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‘•Ju Walked a Black Bear.” Page 3o. 





Live Boys in Oregon 


OR 

AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


BY 


LOUIS ALBERT BANKS 

n 

AUTHOR OF “WHITE SLAVES” “HONEYCOMBS OF LIFE” ETC. 


ILLUSTRATED 



LEE AND SHEPARD PUBLISHERS 


1900 


82129 



Library of Coo^reoa 

Iwu Copies Receweo 

NOV 30 1900 





SECOND corr 

OHWed to 

OROEa OfVISION 

ft EC 1 1900 


Copyright, 1900, by Lee and Shepard 
Live Boys in Oregon 


Copyright, 1897, by Lee and Shepard 

AS 

An Oregon Boyhood 



NoriDooti ^ress 

J. S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick 8c Smith 
Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 


CONTENTS i 


Chapter 

I. 

-7— • — 

A Romance of the Plains . 

• 


• 

Page 

I 

IL 

Babyhood in a Log-cabin . 

• 


f 

10 

III. 

■1 

Primitive Church-going in Oregon 

• 


• 

19 

IV. 

In and Out of the Old Log Schoolhouse 


29 

V. 

A Budding Nimrod 



• 

36 

VI. 

A Boy’s Hunting Tales 



• 

44 

VII. 

A Hunter’s Luck 



• 

53 

VIII. 

The Log-book of a Young Fisherman 



62 

IX. 

Wigwam and Fish-spear 

• 



71 

X. 

Waterwheels and Fish-nets 

• 



79 

XI. 

Tent and Camp .... 

• 



87 

XII. 

Nuggets of Gold .... 




96 

XIII. 

Mountain Climbing 




105 

XIV. 

On the Mountain Top 




114 

XV. 

Fun and Fellowship . 




122 

XVI. 

The Knight of the Saddle-bags 

• 



130 

XVII. 

Legend and Barbecue . 

• 



139 

XVIII. 

Near to Nature’s Heart . 

• 



148 

XIX. 

Frontier College Life 

• 



157 

XX. 

Out of Boyhood into Manhood 

• 



165 



AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


1 

A ROMANCE OF THE PLAINS 

To the great majority of those who read these 
chapters, the scenes portrayed will be so different 
from those to which they have been accustomed 
in their Eastern homes that they will, no doubt, 
often seem unreal, and almost impossible. And, 
indeed, much of it would appear very different if 
the same communities were visited to-day. The 
boys and girls who are growing up under the 
shadow of Mount Hood at the- present time will 
never know, except from chronicles like these, the 
wonderland into which it was my fortune to be 
born forty-one years ago. 

Yet the natural scenery is so magnificent that 
it must ever be a wonderland while the world 
stands. I shall have to ask you, while you accom- 
pany me in these chapters, to take leave of the 
accustomed and conventional, and 


2 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


Follow me 

To where the white caps of a sea 
Of mountains break and break again, 

As blown in foam against a star — 

As breaks the fury of a main — 

And there remain as fixed, as far. 

Ye who love 

The shaggy forests, fierce delights 
Of sounding waterfalls, of heights 
That hang like broken moons above, 

With brows of pine that brush the sun. 

Believe and follow.” 

The journey to Oregon to-day is a very simple 
matter — a mere item of six days in a drawing- 
room car; with a comfortable bed at night, with 
soft pillows and fresh sheets; and a dining-room 
car attached, with all the delicacies of civilization to 
tempt the appetite. It was a very different expe- 
rience in 1852, when it took my father six months 
to go from Benton County, Ark., to Benton 
County, Ore., with an ox team. Very slowly 
their long lines of canvas-covered “ prairie-schoon- 
ers wound their way behind the patient oxen, 
meek and slow, across Kansas and Nebraska and 
Colorado, that were then thought to be the Great 
American Desert and not worth the settling. 
With tireless pluck and ever-springing hope they 
climbed over the Rocky Mountains and pushed 
onward, traversing the great “ inland empire ” of 


A ROMANCE OF THE PLAINS 


3 


Eastern Oregon, forcing their weary limbs to carry 
them around the mighty gorge of the cascades of 
the Columbia, the Oregon of the youthful Bryant, 
and which as yet 

Heard no sound save its own dashings.” 

On, always on,- poured that second tide of Argo- 
nauts, until they reached the Willamette Valley, 
which was at that time the goal of the Western 
pioneer. 

Far back, on what was known as the plains, in 
that weird and strange region on the boundary 
between Oregon and Southern Idaho, where the 
little Burnt River enters the large and treacherous 
Snake River, my father saw the great sunset of 
his young life in the death of his father and 
mother. After five months of ceaseless travel 
and exertion, enduring hardships beyond number, 
when almost in sight of the promised land, their 
devoted train was overtaken by an epidemic of 
cholera which that year followed the trail of the 
emigrants and destroyed a large portion of the 
men, women, and children of their fated band. 

His mother fell first, and they buried her with 
other friends who succumbed to the fatal disease 
at that sad camping-place at the foot of a giant 
boulder, as big as an ordinary dwelling-house, cov- 
ering every grave over with huge piles of stone to 


4 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


save the bodies from the ravaging teeth of prairie 
wolves. At that time this lonely graveyard was 
half a thousand miles from any human habitation, 
save an Indian wigwam or some trader’s movable 
hut. Imagine my astonishment when, a few years 
ago, I came over that old trail with a camping 
outfit, pitching my tent night after night at the 
old camping-places, coming with sad interest to 
seek out the spot of my grandmother’s grave, to 
find there a bustling, growing railroad town, and 
that the Union depot of the Oregon Railway and 
Navigation Company’s line, and the Oregon Short- 
Line Branch of the Union Pacific Railroad, was 
building almost on the very spot of that once lonely 
burying-place, and stands to-day as her strange and 
unique monument. 

Those long wagon-trains left their mark on hills 
and mountains everywhere. So deeply did the 
wagons cut their ruts, and these have been so ex- 
aggerated by the wash of the rains and melting 
of the snows of succeeding years, that it is as easy 
to follow that old trail that has not been used for 
more than a quarter of a century as it would be 
to follow a railroad track. 

Perhaps it was the memory of many a tale of 
buffalo-hunting and perilous nights standing guard 
over the sleeping camp, watching against hostile 
Indians, with which my father had often regaled 


A ROMANCE OF THE PLAINS 


5 


my childish ears, that made those days on the old 
trail full of romance to me. At any rate, they- 
seemed to me to be haunted with the shadows of 
passing wagon-trains, and I should not have been 
astonished at any time to have seen coming over 
the brow of the hills a band of mounted Indians 
in war-paint, with bow at rest and quiver .of arrows 
dangling at the shoulder. 

Joaquin Miller, a native Oregonian, who was a 
backwoods boy of several years’ standing even at 
the time of my early advent in those Western wilds, 
has sung the story of those hardy pioneers in a 
way that deserves appreciation, even at the hands 
of the successors of those other pioneers who 
landed on Plymouth Rock : 

A tale half told and hardly understood ; 

The talk of bearded men that chanced to meet, 

That leaned on long, quaint rifles in the wood, 

That looked in fellow faces, spoke discreet 
And low, as half in doubt, and in defeat 
Of hope ; a tale it was of lands of gold 
That lay toward the sun. Wild-winged and fleet 
It spread among the swift Missouri’s bold. 

Unbridled men, and reached to where Ohio roll’d. 

The long chain’d lines of yoked and patient steers ; 

The long white trains that pointed to the West, 

Beyond the savage West ; the hopes and fears 
Of blunt, untutored men, who hardly guess’d 
Their course ; the brave and silent women dress’d 


6 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


In homely spun attire, the boys in bands, 

The cheery babes that laughed at all, and bless’d 
The doubting hearts with laughing lifted hands. 
Proclaimed an exodus for far untraversed lands. 

“ The plains! The shouting drivers at the wheel. 

The crash of leather whips ; the crush and roll 
Of wheels ; the groan of yokes and grinding steel 
And iron chains, and lo! at last the whole 
Vast line that reached as if to touch the goal. 

Began to stretch and stream away and wind 
Toward the West, as if with one control ; 

Then hope loomed fair, and home lay far behind; 

Before, the boundless plain, and fiercest of their kind. 

The way lay wide and green and fresh as seas, 

And far away as any reach of waves ; 

And sunny streams went by in belts of trees ; 

And here and there the tassell’d tawny brave 

Swept by on horse, look’d back, stretch’d forth and gave 

A yell of hell, and then did wheel and rein 

Awhile, and point away, dark-browed and grave, 

Into the far and dim and distant plain 

With signs and prophecies, and then plunged on again. 

Some hills at last began to lift and break ; 

Some streams began to fail of wood and tide. 

The sombre plain began betime to take 
A weary brown, and wild and wide 
It stretched its naked breast on every side. 

A babe was heard at last to cry for bread 
Amid the deserts ; cattle lowed and died. 

And dying men went by with broken tread. 

And left a long black serpent line of wreck and dead. 


A ROMANCE OF THE PLAINS 


7 


“ They sat in desolation and in dust 
By dried-up desert streams ; the mother’s hands 
Hid all her bended face ; the cattle thrust 
Their tongues and faintly called across the lands. 

The babes, that knew not what the way through sands 
Could mean, would ask if it would end to-day. 

The panting wolves slid by, red-eyed, in bands 
To streams beyond. The men look’d far away. 

And silent saw that all a boundless desert lay. 


“ They rose by night ; they struggled on and on. 

As thin and still as ghosts ; then here and there 
Beside the dusty way before the dawn 
Men silent laid them down in their despair. 

And died. But woman! Woman frail as fair ! 

May man have strength to give to you your due ; 

You falter’d not, nor murmured anywhere; 

You held your babes, held to your course, and you 

Bore on through burning hell your double burthens through. 


They stood at last, a decimated few. 

Above a land of running streams, and they ? 

They pushed aside the boughs, and peering through. 
Beheld the cool, refreshing bay ; 

Then some did curse, and some bend hands to pray. 

But some looked back upon the desert, wide 

And desolate with death : then all the day 

They wept. But one with nothing left beside 

His dog to love, crept down among the ferns and died.” 

My mother had come to Oregon the year before 
my father arrived. She was then only a girl of 
fourteen. Her family came from near Detroit, 


8 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


Mich., and they made the way overland by mule 
teams — more stubborn, but not so slow as the 
oxen — in a little more than three months. A 
hundred miles south of Portland, on the banks 
of the Willamette River, they had made their 
last camping-place, and there being plenty of 
water and fertile valleys and abundant timber, 
my grandfather had staked out his land claim 
and begun to make a home. Here it was, the 
next year, that my father, a lonely, broken-hearted 
boy not yet twenty years of age, came seeking 
employment and a chance to work out his destiny 
in this new land. 

He staked out a donation land claim of the old 
generous sort of those early days, across among 
the oak hills some ten miles away — for thedand 
in the river bottom was already claimed. He built 
him a little log-cabin, which he stayed in over 
night often enough to hold his claim, but had to 
work at splitting rails, or clearing up land, or 
whatever employment opened, for more estab- 
lished settlers, to make his living in the mean- 
time. He worked hard all the week, and when 
Sunday came, saddled up the little dun-colored 
mare that he had ridden from Arkansas, and on 
which he had chased more than a hundred buffa- 
loes to their death, and rode the ten miles across 
the prairie that lay between his lonely cabin and 


A ROMANCE OF THE PLAINS 


9 


the little blue-eyed girl, not yet sixteen, at Father 
Hurlburt’s. 

No wonder they should have been in a hurry in 
those days to get married, for it was lonely in a 
log-cabin, with the nearest neighbor three miles 
away ; and courting must have been rather unsat- 
isfactory in one of those old one-roomed houses, 
where father and mother and all the brothers and 
sisters had to hear all that was being said ; so they 
soon made it up. The lack of proper conven- 
iences for a long-continued courtship is no doubt 
to some extent responsible for the fact that my 
gentle little mother is only seventeen years older 
than myself. 


II 


BABYHOOD IN A LOG-CABIN 

The old Oregon Donation Land Claim was a 
mile square, provided it was a married man who 
staked it out ; otherwise it only ran half a mile in 
one direction. It is wonderful how a little arrange- 
ment like that helps to stimulate the matrimonial 
market. 

Up in the oak hills, overlooking the Willamette 
Valley, and having for its background the long 
green wall of the Coast Range Mountains, with 
their sombre forests of fir and hemlock and spruce 
reaching as far as the eye could gaze, my father 
staked out his claim and prepared his cabin against 
the wedding day. Here he brought his wife in 
August, 1854, and here I came to keep them com- 
pany on Nov. 12, 1855. 

My mother needed company, for father’s work 
took him away for a good part of every day, and 
the nearest neighbor was three miles distant. I 
suppose there are not a great many log-cabins in 
existence, now, of exactly the type of the one in 


10 


BABYHOOD IN A LOG-CABIN 


II 


whicTi I was born, though three-fourths of all the 
dwellings in Oregon were of the same kind at 
that time. The house was built of logs unhewn. 
The timber was felled in the forest and cut off the 
proper length, and either “ snaked out ” on the 
ground, endways, or hauled to the place where 
the house was to go up. Then notches were 
chopped near the end, so that the logs would fit 
together into a square building. Of course this 
left a little crack between the logs. A thin strip 
of split timber, the proper length and thickness, 
was driven into this crack, and then it was daubed 
over or “ chinked ” with mud. This made the 
house quite warm, so long as the “ chinking ” 
kept snug and tight; but when that became dry 
and began to fall out, or a rat or a squirrel dug a 
hole through it, it improved the ventilation, but 
made it decidedly airy on a cold night. 

The cabin had only one room, and therefore 
only one door. After it was built up the proper 
height they sawed out a hole for the door, and 
sawed out on the other side two logs deep, and 
about two feet long, for a window. The door was 
fastened by a latch on the inside, and a buckskin 
string ran through a small hole in the door, and 
hung down on the outside. If we wished to give 
notice that people were not to come in, we pulled 
in the latch-string. The common expression in 


12 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


giving invitations to visit one another, throughout 
all my early days, vras, “The latch-string hangs 
out.” 

The floor was made of split logs, with the flat 
side up. This upper side was smoothed down 
with an adze or a foot-axe until it was comparatively 
smooth. This was called a “ puncheon ” floor. 
There was no carpet on the floor, and mother kept 
it clean by scouring it twice a week with white 
sand. When the baby was put on the floor, he 
was set on a buffalo robe, or deerskin, or bearskin, 
until he was supposed to be old enough to look 
after himself, and keep the splinters out of his 
legs. One or two dogs, usually deer hounds, 
were considered to be necessary and healthy asso- 
ciates for the baby in his place before the fire. 

A good part of one end of the house was taken 
up with the fireplace. If stone was plenty, and 
easy to get, the fireplace and chimney were built 
of that; but if, as on my father’s claim, it was 
scarce, it was built of mud and timber, and was 
what they called a “ stick-and-clay ” chimney. A 
stranger to that sort of building would find it hard 
to believe that such a chimney would stand weather 
in the winter, or fail to burn the house down in 
the summer ; but they did sometimes last for 
many years in safety, though it was by no means 
an uncommon occurrence for a cabin to take fire 


BABYHOOD IN A LOG-CABIN 


13 


and burn up from the clay getting knocked off 
and the chimney-sticks catching fire. 

This fireplace was a mammoth affair, and would 
take in a big oak back-log five or six feet long. 
The regulation fire was made by putting in one 
big log, as thick through as my father could man- 
age; and often he would get help, and have two 
or three men assist him in rolling in a great log, 
two feet thick or more ; then another log, about 
half the size, went on top of that. Where people 
were forehanded enough, they had a pair of and- 
irons, or “ dog-irons ” they called them out there. 
They were none of your dainty brass fixings, but 
were made by the country blacksmith out of a 
cast-off wagon-tire. Many people were not able 
to afford such fancy arrangements as that, and my 
father was one of them, and so we had two large 
stones to hold up the forestick in front, which was 
itself a piece of wood of no mean proportions, and 
usually as big as a man would care to carry on his 
shoulder. 

My ! What a fire that did make ! It was both 
warmth and light, and it was a rare thing that any 
other light was used, even for reading at night. 
When a' better light was necessary, some tallow 
was put in an old plate or in a tin dish, and a rag 
wick, twisted and greased and all immersed in the 
tallow except the end, was lighted. I saw no other 


H 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


lamp than that for several years. After I grew 
older, and we began to get more well-to-do, we 
began to dip candles, which did not make a much 
better light, .however, than the old way. 

All the cooking was done at the fireplace. I 
was quite a large boy before I ever saw a cooking- 
stove. Across the long way of the fireplace ran 
a stout iron bar just below the mouth of the chim- 
ney. Along this bar there were always hanging 
a number of strong iron hooks of different lengths, 
to accommodate the kettle to the condition of the 
fire. A large part of the cooking was done by 
boiling or stewing in the kettle. There was a 
broad stone hearth, and the bread-baking was done 
there. Some people had big tin reflectors, in 
which they baked their bread, but my mother 
baked hers in a big oven that made round loaves 
about the shape and size of a small cheese. It 
sat up on legs two or three inches high, on the 
hearth, and when the bread was raised and ready 
to bake, the red coals were pulled under it. A 
big iron lid fitted down over the top of the oven, 
and this, too, was covered over with hot coals. 
There was a ring in the top of the oven-lid, and 
it required a pretty steady nerve to put* a poker 
through that ring, and lift it off, covered with coals 
and ashes, without spilling something off the lid 
into the bread. 


BABYHOOD IN A LOG-CABIN 


15 


Potatoes were often roasted in the hot ashes, 
and the children thought eggs were pretty good 
that way, too. One of the first memories I have 
of eating was the delicious roasted apples that 
were cooked on the hot stones in front of the fire. 
How they would sputter! The picture all comes 
back to me now ! My sister is a little baby in the 
cradle, and I a three-year-old toddler with an appe- 
tite big enough for a man. The great fire flames 
up about the old iron tea-kettle that steams and 
puffs like a young locomotive ; the venison, stew- 
ing in the great pot beside it, sends out a savory 
odor, good enough to the smell to make you for- 
give Isaac for letting his blessing turn on a mess 
of venison. The bread is toasting on long forks 
stuck in front of the flames. The red apples in 
a row are roasting for the dessert, and are not red- 
der than mother’s face, who has just been rescuing 
the coffee-pot from its bed of coals in the corner, 
where it has but now boiled over. 

By the way, that was true Oregonian coffee, 
made of parched wheat or barley, and in no danger 
of keeping one awake at night. 

The bed ran across the back end of the room. 
A long pole, the proper distance out from the wall, 
ran across the entire end of the room ; split boards 
formed the base-work of the bed, and this was high 
enough for a trundle-bed to go underneath. The 


l6 AN OREGON BOYHOOD 

trundle-bed was a great institution in those days. 
As the family grew (for I am the eldest of twelve 
children, eleven of whom are living), nearly every 
bed in the house had a trundle-bed under it. A 
big straw bed went next the boards, and then a 
splendid feather-bed, made of feathers plucked 
from the breasts of wild geese and ducks, the spoils 
of my father’s gun, made a resting-place that was 
not to be despised by weary limbs. 

The roof of the cabin was made of boards, split 
or rived by hand. These were just laid on in rows, 
with a third board over the crack where the two 
came together, and then, as nails were scarce and 
expensive, and not to be thought of in the first 
cabins, big heavy logs were laid on, the full length 
of the roof, and staked at the ends with wooden 
pins that fastened them to the logs at the end of 
the building. This was not so good as nails, but 
it served to keep the boards fairly well in place, 
and to hold the roof down and keep it from blow- 
ing away. 

The outside of the cabin was as picturesque as 
the inside. When a coon or a deer or a wildcat 
or a panther or a bear was killed, the settler took 
a good deal of pride in putting up the skin where 
it could be seen. So the outside of the frontier 
cabin was a pretty fair barometer of the luck, or 
sportsmanship, of the man who lived inside. The 


BABYHOOD IN A LOG-CABIN 1 7 

skin was turned the fur side to the wall, and 
stretched as tight as possible, and nailed to the 
logs, and there it would stay until it dried, when 
it was taken down to be made into a rug, or tanned 
for buckskin, or carried to the neighboring town 
to sell. 

Life went on very quietly, for the most part, 
and a journey to the county town fifteen miles 
away was the occasion of nearly. as much prepara- 
tion and after-comment as a summer trip to Europe 
is now. I was a little slow in learning to talk, and 
when I was twenty months old my mother took 
me to the doctor, making the long journey of thirty 
miles there and back in a dead-ax wagon, in order 
to have me examined, as she feared I was tongue- 
tied. The physician, after due examination, as- 
sured her that I would in all probability talk till 
she was tired of it, — a prophecy which I amply 
fulfilled. 

Looking back on it now, I can see that baby- 
hood in a log-cabin was a very rude and primeval 
experience. There were no modern toys. No tin 
wagons, with cast-iron horses, or marbles with 
squirrels in them, or Noah’s ark loaded with ani- 
mals that it would be perfectly safe to worship, 
since they are unlike anything “ that is in heaven 
above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in 
the water under the earth.” The nearest store 
' c 


8 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


was ten miles away, and all the little pretty things 
in the way of pictures, children’s books, and kin- 
dergarten blocks were unknown and undreamed 
of. But I had my father and mother, and I saw 
them to my heart’s content, for there were no clubs 
to go to, no lodges to attend, and nothing to take 
them away from the house at night. I had my 
dog and my cat, the chickens and the ducks, the 
little colts, and the calves and the pigs, the wild 
flowers, the birds and the squirrels, in endless pro- 
fusion ; and above all, I had a mile square in which 
to make mud-pies, and halloo and laugh as loud as 
I would. I exercised my liberty to the fullest ex- 
tent, and looking back over it, I would not exchange 
my memory of that log-cabin up in the oak hills 
for the richest mansion on Fifth Avenue. 


Ill 


PRIMITIVE CHURCH-GOING IN OREGON 

When I had reached the mature age of four 
years, my father purchased one of the oldest set- 
tled farms in the county, — one having on it an 
unusually large orchard. It was one of the first 
really splendid apple orchards planted in that 
part of the country. He had to go in debt for 
it very largely, but, by hard work and painstaking 
economy, he managed to pay for it out of the 
fruit. 

When we moved on to this farm, we changed 
from the old log-cabin with one room to quite a 
large, two-story house, built of big, hewn logs, 
with a wide porch along the front, after the style 
of the old-fashioned Southern houses. It was at 
the time one of the best houses for a great many 
miles around. There was a large sitting-room, 
with a bed and trundle-bed in it, and then a large 
dining-room and kitchen, all on the ground floor, 
with other bedrooms upstairs. The two big fire- 
places were built back to back in the centre of the 


19 


20 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


partition between the two rooms, and the cooking 
was done on one side in much the same style as 
in the old cabin. 

Our sitting-room was the largest in the neigh- 
borhood, and that was one reason why it was a 
very popular place for religious meetings, before 
there were any churches. My parents were very 
thoroughgoing in their religion, and the very first 
memories I have are of family worship. Every 
evening, as it came to be bedtime for the children, 
father would take down his old family Bible, which 
he had brought across the plains, and which had 
two or three generations of Bankses registered in 
it in his father’s handwriting, and would read a 
chapter, and, after singing one of the old-fashioned 
hymns, we would kneel down there in the fire- 
light, and he would lead in prayer. If father was 
away from home, mother took the Bible in his 
stead, and the fireside church went on as usual. 

My father was a good singer, and throughout 
all my younger days always “ pitched the tunes ” 
in the meetings held in the neighborhood, or at 
the camp-meeting. It was really worth while to 
see him lead the music at the camp-meeting. His 
voice had little training, but it was a wonderfully 
rich, clear voice, and had the greatest carrying 
power of any voice I ever heard. I have often 
heard him talking to other men in the field, and 


PRIMITIVE CHURCH-GOING IN OREGON 


21 


could distinguish every word when I was half a 
mile distant ; and it was a common thing to hear 
his laugh a mile away. When he got turned 
loose on “ Coronation ” or Martyn ” or “ Nettle- 
ton,” a cornet was not in the race in comparison 
with his great, whole-souled voice in leading the 
singing in a backwoods congregation. 

The very first church I remember, except the 
family worship, was when some passing preacher 
would happen in unexpectedly to stay over night. 
Then father would get on his horse and ride 
around to some of the neighbors, and perhaps 
start some of them on to tell the news, and by 
the time supper was over and the chores done, 
the people would begin to come in until the big 
sitting-room would be crowded with men and 
women and children, hungry for the rare oppor- 
tunity for hearing a sermon. How they would 
drink in every word he said ! It was none of 
your little sermonettes, either, for an hour was a 
very short sermon for one of those week-evening 
meetings, and he would often preach an hour 
and a half. 

The first religious meeting I attended, outside 
of our own sitting-room, was at the old Bellfon- 
taine schoolhouse, which was about two miles 
from our place. It was a small log schoolhouse, 
that would probably seat comfortably about seventy- 


22 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


five people; though people who are accustomed 
to sitting on cushions in modern church pews 
could hardly believe that it could seat anybody 
“ comfortably.” The seats were made by splitting 
a log in two, and smoothing off the flat side to 
sit on, and then auger-holes were bored into this 
piece near the end, through which the legs were 
thrust. There were no backs, and under long 
sermons they became very tiresome. Some people 
put their old-fashioned leather-bottomed chairs in 
the wagon, rode in them to the meeting, and then 
carried them into the schoolhouse and put them 
in the aisles for a sort of private pew during the 
service. One of the childhood diversions of those 
meetings was the not uncommon occurrence of a 
small boy going to sleep on one of those puncheon 
seats and rolling off on the floor. This not only 
woke the boy up, but everybody else in the house, 
including the preacher. 

If there was to be preaching in the evening, 
the preacher would announce that “ There will 
be divine service in this placer at early candle- 
light.” That was as near as anybody ever thought 
of arranging for an hour for evening meeting. 
Perhaps not half the houses in the neighborhood 
had a watch or a clock ; people milked their cows 
and had their suppers about the same time in the 
evening, and then would gather rather more 


PRIMITIVE CHURCH-GOING IN OREGON 23 

promptly than they do now in an Eastern 
church. 

The old schoolhouse was never locked, and - 
there was no sexton. There was a pile of wood 
kept outside, on the ground, and the neighbors 
took turns in going first with kindling-wood to 
make a fire, in the season when fire was needed. 
There was no arrangement whatever for light in 
the schoolhouse, except some boards hanging on 
nails around the sides of the wall, with a little 
foot strip across the bottom, about the size of a 
man’s hand, in which were driven three nails, close 
enough to hold a candle between them. Every 
family was supposed to bring one or more candles 
with them. Most people did this willingly, but 
there were some stingy folks who attended the 
meeting as regularly as anybody, but who were 
never known to bring a candle. Such people got 
their pay in being gossiped about, and one of our 
neighbors used to say that a man who always 
went to church and never took a candle was 
“ close enough to skin a flea for his hide and 
tallow.” 

It used to interest me very much, when we 
happened to be first at the meeting, which was 
not a rare occurrence, to see the old schoolhouse 
lighted up at night. The walls were blackened 
and smoked, and required a good deal of light to 


24 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


make much impression. We would go in and put 
up our one or two candles, and then, one by one, 
as the families came in, the light increased in pro- 
portion to the size of the congregation. When 
the holders were full, if still other candles were 
brought, the owner would light them and drop 
some hot tallow on the window-sill, and then stand 
the candle in it before the grease hardened. I 
have often seen a candle standing that way on 
every window-sill, as well as on the table which 
did service for a pulpit. Usually some one brought 
a brass or tin candlestick for the preacher’s own 
special use. It would have been a hard place to 
have read a sermon. 

Of course the candles had to be snuffed several 
times during the service, and I don’t know any- 
thing that will make a mischievous boy laugh in 
church more quickly than to see some clumsy 
fellow burn his fingers snuffing the candle, and 
dab his hand into his mouth to suck out the fire, 
or choke down the bad word he feels like saying. 

The great meetings of my boyhood, however, 
were the camp-meetings which were held every 
summer in a pine grove not far from this school- 
house. There was a fine spring of water there, 
which was famous throughout the country, and 
the people used to come for forty or fifty miles 
around and camp out at those meetings. There 


PRIMITIVE CHURCH-GOING IN OREGON 25 

were no planked tents at those first camp-meet- 
ings, and nothing of the modern Chautauqua cot- 
tage idea, but white canvas tents were put up by 
the hundreds. Chickens were roasted, pies made 
by the scores, and bread baked to last a week or 
more, and the people came together to give all 
their time to the public services. 

There was a big platform, large enough to hold 
a dozen or more preachers, and what was called 
the “preachers’ tent” was put up behind it. Flat 
puncheon seats, like those in the schoolhouse, 
were placed in long rows in front of this plat- 
form. Hay was scattered among these seats to 
keep the place from getting dusty. The lights, 
with the exception of candles at the pulpit stand, 
were made by great torches. Four upright sticks, 
about four feet apart, were driven into the ground, 
strips were nailed across near the top of these, 
and a floor of green poles laid across these strips. 
This was covered with a bed of earth six or eight 
inches thick, and then a big fire was lighted on 
the top. When a dozen of these torches, scat- 
tered about through the outer edges of the con- 
gregation, were fed by pitch-pine sticks, they 
made an illumination that was as weird and spec- 
tral as it was effective. 

It was not only the saints, however, who 
gathered at these camp-meetings; for on the 


26 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


frontier, as well as in the days of Job, when the 
sons of God came together for worship, Satan 
came also. The preachers and leading laymen 
were always on the lookout for reckless fellows 
who would bring whiskey on the grounds, and 
start up what was called a “brush barroom.” 
Usually about the third or fourth day of the 
meeting they would begin to get up horse-races 
somewhere near, and seek to annoy the camp- 
meeting folks. Hardly a camp-meeting passed 
by without some tussle with the ruffians who 
would undertake to break up the meeting by 
their hoodlumism. Every once in a while some 
irreverent scoundrel would come to the “ mourner’s 
bench,” pretending to be very seriously concerned 
about his soul, when in reality he was only seek- 
ing for an opportunity to do some outbreaking 
deed that would cast discredit on the meeting. 
But those frontier preachers became very shrewd 
in handling such cases, and often turned the 
tables on the youngsters in a way to teach them 
a good lesson. 

On one occasion, which I remember, one of the 
men, who was on guard to prevent disorder on the 
outskirts of the camp, heard two young men make 
a bet with some of their comrades that they would 
go to the altar when the invitation was given, and 
when the meeting was thoroughly warmed up they 


PRIMITIVE CHURCH-GOING IN OREGON 2/ 

would take the whiskey bottles out of their pockets, 
and drink the health of the preacher, and get 
away without being caught. He came in, of 
course, and made the plan known, and so the 
preachers were on the lookout for them. After 
the sermon, when the invitation was given to 
those who desired to begin a Christian life to 
come forward to be prayed for, these two young 
men presented themselves with the others. When 
all kneeled down to pray, the minister in charge 
knelt behind these men, and managed to slip their 
whiskey bottles out of their pockets, and push them 
back in the hay under a seat, without anybody 
knowing it except the young men in question. 
They saw at once that their game was up, and 
began to plan as to how to get away. The 
preacher, seeing that they were whispering to- 
gether, leaned over and heard one say to the 
other, “When they get up to sing you cut for 
the brush with all your might, and I’ll follow.” 

But when they rose they found one of the min- 
ister’s strong muscular hands thoroughly clenched 
on the collar of each of their coats, and his warn- 
ing voice saying in their ears, “ Kneel down, 
brother, kneel down ! ” They knelt down. When 
the regular meeting was dismissed, he told the 
brethren that he would like to have some of them 
remain with these two a little longer. He kept 


28 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


them there till after twelve o’clock, and when they 
finally got away it was with a most earnest prom- 
ise never to undertake to disturb a camp-meeting 
again. 'One old German brother who was present, 
when he was told about the circumstances, said : 
“Ach, mein goodness! unt all dose gut prayers 
wasted I ” 


IV* 


IN AND OUT OF THE OLD LOG SCHOOLHOUSE 

Although I did not go to school until I was 
seven years of age, my education was by no means 
neglected in the meantime, for my mother began 
with me as soon as I was able to talk, and despite 
the added cares which came upon her with the 
rapidly increasing family, she managed to take 
time enough from other duties to insist on a 
pretty thorough application to my studies. By 
dint of her devotion, and a generous use of plum 
and cherry switches and various other orchard 
growths, when I first attended school, at the age 
of seven, I could read very passably in the fifth 
reader, and had gone as far as “cube root” in the 
old “ Davies’ Arithmetic,” and managed to get 
away with the prize in the spelling class, where 
most of the boys and girls were twice my age. 
I have an abiding faith that the best school on 
earth in which to start young ideas to shoot is a 
farmhouse with a mother in it as a teacher who 
possesses a good deal of ambition and grit enough 
to use the plum switches well. 

29 


30 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


The average school district in those days had 
only three months of school in the year, but in our 
district we usually had school six months. This 
cov.ered three months in the winter and three 
months in the early summer. By the time I was 
old enough to go, a schoolhouse was built only a 
mile away from our place, and I was considered 
a very favored individual, for there were few of 
the children who did not come much farther, and 
some walked between three and four miles. 

The first teacher that I had was a young man 
by the name of Martin, who has for many reasons 
remained in my memory a very romantic and 
splendid picture. He was a fine-looking young 
fellow, tall and straight as an arrow, and while 
kindly in his disposition, had remarkable self- 
possession and dignity for so young a man. He 
only taught a few weeks, as his school was broken 
up by his enlisting as a volunteer in the army. 
This was in 1862, when the war was in full blast, 
and while Oregon was not called upon for troops 
to go to the South, the regular troops were drawn 
away from the forts, in what was then known as 
the Indian Country, and the state was called upon 
to furnish volunteers to take their places. Each 
county was levied upon for its proportion of the 
number required. The recruiting officers, accom- 
panied by a brass band and speakers to make 


IN AND OUT OF THE OLD LOG SCHOOLHOUSE 3 1 

patriotic addresses, held mass-meetings in every 
schoolhouse in the country, and when the fervor 
of patriotism was raised to the highest pitch, the 
call was made for volunteers. Many a young 
fellow enlisted under such circumstances who re- 
pented it afterward at his leisure. It was a most 
exciting day in our schoolhouse. It had been 
announced through all the country round about, 
and the people came in and brought their dinners 
and made a picnic day of it. A brass band was 
then a very uncommon affair. I had never seen 
or heard one, and I remember that the instrument 
that impressed me most was the cymbals, and after 
that the big bass drum. 

The boys who lived to get through their term 
of service and come back were received with great 
consideration and regard by all the neighbors. 

We were not always as fortunate in our teachers. 
Some of them were men who would have fitted 
some other business a great deal better. I remem- 
ber one man whose name I have forgotten, but 
whom the boys called “ Old Rusty,” because, on 
many occasions when there were things he could 
not understand or explain, he would scratch his 
head, and say with a puzzled air, “ I used to 
know that well; but you see Fm a little rusty. 
I’ve been out of school so long.” Some of his 
punishments were very novel. One was to send 


32 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


a boy to the blackboard, with his face to the 
board, and command him to stretch himself up 
just as far as he possibly could, then the teacher 
would draw a chalk-line and require the boy to 
hold his nose up to that line. It seemed too easy 
for anything, at first, but if you’ve never tried it 
you have no idea how monotonous it gets after 
a minute or two, and what a desire you will have 
to let down a little. 

Once, when the weather was getting warmer, 
and there was no fire in the sheet-iron stove, he 
put three boys to stand on the stove, using it as 
a dunce-block. One of the boys was much larger 
than the others, and he was standing next the 
stove-pipe. The teacher was sitting at the end 
of the room, in a straight line from the rear of 
the stove, with his head down, doing some writing. 
Suddenly the two little boys gave a combined 
lurch with their shoulders into the ribs of the 
bigger one, and brought him with such force 
against the stove-pipe that the whole pipe came 
down, striking the teacher on the side of the head, 
scattering the soot everywhere, and dispersing the 
school to the door. The three barefooted rascals, 
of course, rolled off on the floor, and got up 
weeping, and were sent to their seats without 
further punishment, a leniency they highly appre- 
ciated — as I know, having been the middle boy • 
in the scrimmage. 


IN AND OUT OF THE OLD LOG SCHOOLHOUSE 33 

In those days the teacher “boarded around,” 
and as “ Old Rusty ” was an especially interesting 
converser and had been a great traveller, my father 
welcomed him to spend nearly the entire term at 
our house. 

The sports of those days partook largely of the 
atmosphere of the country where we were. Base- 
ball was then unknown, but we often played 
shinny, which wq had, of course, learned from 
the Indians. A wooden ball was used for this 
game, and long wooden clubs, crooked at the end. 
I suppose it was called shinny because it was a 
terrible game on a boy’s shins. Rude as it was, 
however, and learned from half-savage Indians, it 
did not begin to be so brutal and dangerous as the 
modern football exploits of our Eastern colleges. 

Another game which was a great favorite in the 
summer time, at the noon hour, was “deer and 
hounds.” The fleetest boy in the school — or 
one among the fleetest, for there were always 
several rivals for that championship — was chosen 
for the deer, and all the rest were hounds. A 
broad open pasture of several hundred acres, with 
here and there clumps of brush and timber, was 
the running-ground. The deer was allowed a cer- 
tain start, but he was well surrounded, at a distance 
of a couple of hundred yards or so, with the hounds, 
who sought to close in on him and hold him. It 


34 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


was not sufficient to catch him ; he must be held. 
The game at least had the merit of being good 
exercise, and was a good settler for a healthy boy’s 
lunch. 

In the winter time big snow forts were some- 
times erected, in case of a snowstorm, and two of 
the boys would “choose up,” dividing the forces 
as nearly equal as possible, and the way the snow- 
balls would fly would be a caution. Although it 
was against the rules of the game, sometimes, when 
bad blood was stirred, the balls would be soaked 
in water and squeezed until they were as hard as 
rocks, and then some one was almost sure to get 
hurt, and the teacher would have to interfere. 

There was a hill near the schoolhouse, fine for 
coasting in winter, and a favorite way was to take 
a plank about six or eight feet long, sharpening it 
a little on the under side at the front end, and, 
nailing a cleat across the top about a foot from the 
front, sit flat down on the board with feet braced 
against the cleat. In that way we had a sort of a 
rude toboggan, though we had never heard of that 
word. In this game the girls often took part. 

I remember another game which I never saw 
played but once, but which all the school took a 
hand in that time. One of the older neighbor boys 
had been out hunting, and brought home a black 
bear cub, which in the course of time grew to be 


IN AND OUT OF THE OLD LOG SCHOOLHOUSE 35 

a very fine-looking bear. He was kept chained to 
a post, the chain being long enough to permit him 
at will to go into a little house for shelter, and to 
climb a pole for exercise. But one day Bruin got 
his wrath up and broke his chain and came to 
school. The door was standing ajar, and the first 
thing anybody knew, in walked a black bear, and 
stood up on his hind legs, looking around with the 
most cunning astonishment imaginable. It came 
upon us all so suddenly that no one thought but 
that it was a wild beast from the forests, and the 
way big and little scrambled on to the desks, knock- 
ing over the ink-bottles as they went, was a spec- 
tacle to be remembered. One agile little fellow 
jumped out through the window and ran nearly 
half a mile before he dared to look back. That, 
I am proud to say, was not myself, though if my 
window had been up, it might have been a tempta- 
tion. After we had all sought the highest place 
we could get in the room, some of the boys recog- 
nized the bear as the neighbor boy’s pet, and man- 
aged to capture him and lead him home. That 
was the first bear-hunt in which I ever participated. 


V 


A BUDDING NIMROD 

The hunting instinct sprouted very early in a 
frontier boy. The very air he breathed was 
gamey ; his very first playmate, after he got down 
from his mother’s lap, was a dog — and usually 
either a bird-dog, or a squirrel-dog, or a deer-hound. 
The guns and the powder-horns he associated with 
his first conscious vision of the walls of the log- 
cabin where he was born. On rainy days the bars 
of lead were brought out, and bullets were run in 
the old, queer-shaped moulds for the long Tennes- 
see rifle, or were cut into ragged slugs to shoot 
from the army musket. In addition to this, game 
was always coming into the house, and was de- 
pended upon as a regular stand-by in the family 
larder. Wild ducks and geese and grouse and 
pheasants and quail were much more common 
visitors than chickens to the family table, and 
venison was about as common as beef. Under 
such circumstances the average healthy, well- 
developed boy took to hunting as naturally as a 
duck does to water. 


36 


A BUDDING NIMROD 


37 


My first hunting experiences began when I was 
a very small boy (before I could be trusted with 
a gun, or indeed would have had the strength to 
carry one, — at least the kind that was common in 
those days) in making trips around the fields with 
a dog, in search of squirrels. A species of large 
gray squirrel was very numerous and exceedingly 
destructive of the grain crops, and I was encour- 
aged in these hunting excursions, not only because 
fat squirrels were delicious eating when broiled, 
but because the death of the squirrels meant safety 
to the grain. The fields were fenced about with 
old-fashioned worm fences, staked and ridered, 
and the squirrels were very sharp in taking care 
of themselves. Although some of them had their 
winter homes in hollow trees, most of them made 
winter quarters in the earth at some distance from 
the fields, up in the hill pastures where they were 
not likely to be disturbed. There they would dig 
a hole, running deep, and then rising again nearer 
the surface of the ground, so as to make them- 
selves safe from water running in at the mouth of 
the hole. It was wonderful the amount of grain 
and nuts these squirrels would stow away in these 
winter garners. It was quite a common thing for 
the older boys, late in the summer after the hazel- 
nut time was over, to club together and dig out 
squirrels where their holes were in hazel groves, 


38 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


and they often found as many as a half bushel of 
hazel-nuts, nicely hulled, in a single hole. 

But Mr. Squirrel was pretty sharp and had 
found out that, in order to save himself from the 
boys and the dogs, it was necessary to have tem- 
porary hiding-places in the fence-corners around 
the edge of the field, and so nearly every corner 
had its squirrel-hole. But I soon discovered that 
these holes were very shallow, usually not as deep 
as a boy’s arm is long; so after I had had a good 
deal of experience squirrel-hunting — for my plan 
was to help get the squirrel into the mouth of the 
dog, and the dog did the killing — I conceived the 
scheme of running my hand into the hole and 
pulling the squirrel out by the tail, handing hirn 
over to the dog’s ready teeth. I had great luck 
at this for a long time, and I suppose I had not 
pulled out less than a hundred squirrels in that 
way, when one day I got hold of an unusually 
profitable hole. One after another I pulled out 
three squirrels, and ran my hand back to see if 
there was another, when I found that there was — 
an unusually wide-awake one ; but he had for- 
gotten to offer me his tail end, and seized my 
finger between his sharp teeth and came out that 
way. The dog killed him, but I thought I was 
killed, too, for a good while. I have never put 
my hand into a squirrel-hole since. After that I 


A BUDDING NIMROD 


39 


used to take a forked stick and twist it in the 
squirrel’s hide, and either make him run out or 
pull him out. This was just as hard on the squir- 
rel, but it was much safer for the boy. 

Another favorite section for squirrel-hunting 
was a belt of ash timber that followed a line of 
swampy ground through my father’s farm and the 
next one adjoining. This was a place the squirrels 
were very partial to on hot days, along about noon 
or a little after. They would fill themselves with 
grain, and then crawl up in the cool shade of the 
ash limbs, and lie there lazily, taking a nap. I 
would come along with the dog, and when I dis- 
covered a squirrel I would climb the tree and 
shake his squirrelship off into the mouth of the 
dog that was standing ready to catch him below. 
The dog enjoyed the sport immensely, and became 
very shrewd and cunning at all these schemes, and 
understood them, and would play his part as well 
as if he were able to talk about it. I would take 
him out away from the tree, and point up to where 
the squirrel was, and he would watch at the place 
where he thought the squirrel was going to drop, 
with flashing eyes and every nerve trembling with 
excitement. 

Long before I had a gun of my own, I used to 
go along with father to carry the game. When I 
was only six or seven years old, I used to walk 


40 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


many miles at a time for the pleasure of being in 
the hunt, and carrying grouse, or ducks, or pheas- 
ants home. One summer afternoon I was carry- 
ing two or three grouse along that way through 
an ash-swamp. I was jumping from the top of 
one big ant-heap to another, when suddenly I 
lighted with my bare foot plump, down on the 
folds of an enormous bull-snake, which was curled 
up asleep on top of the ant-hill. The snake was 
scared as badly as I was, and that was saying a 
good deal ; for when I felt him squirm under my 
foot, I leaped into the air with a scream that could 
have been heard a half-mile, and the grouse I was 
carrying flew in every direction. Father killed the 
snake and measured it, and it only lacked two 
inches of being six feet in length. 

My first experience in hunting where I was per- 
mitted to use . a gun was in going with my father 
to shoot wild geese where they lighted in the ponds 
to feed at night. Once, along in November, father 
noticed that for several nights the geese had been 
coming to a pond about two miles from the house. 
It so happened that just at this time this was the 
only open piece of water in the whole neighbor- 
hood, and the wild geese, which were coming in 
by the tens of thousands every day from the 
North, would alight in this pond towards evening 
and spend the night there in the most noisy kind 
of goose fellowship. 


A BUDDING NIMROD 


4 ^ 


So, while we were doing up the chores, father 
said we would get the work out of the way early, 
and try that pond for a goose. . He said if I would 
be very careful I might take his squirrel rifle and 
have a shot too. Oh, but wasn’t I proud ! I had 
gone with him hunting many a time, but that was 
the first time I had been permitted to carry a gun 
like a man. He loaded up his old musket, and 
gave me the rifle,, and a little before sunset we 
slipped down to the edge of the water, and crept 
into the brush on one side, where we were well 
hidden from view, and there we lay and waited 
for the game. 

It was very still in there, and a muskrat jump- 
ing into the water near us gave me such a start 
that my father laughed at me, and said I was a 
great man to be carrying a gun. Just about sun- 
down, a little band of perhaps a score of geese 
came floating along over our heads, talking low 
and cautiously to each other. How big they did 
look ! They sailed around, making a complete 
circle of the pond, searching everywhere with 
their sharp eyes for any possible enemy ; but, not 
discovering us, they settled down with a great 
splash only a few yards from where we were. 
Father whispered to me to pick out one and take 
good aim, and when he counted three we were 
to shoot. I squinted along the barrel until I saw 


42 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


an old goose between the sights, but I think I 
shut both eyes when I pulled the trigger. Bang ! 
went the guns, and when the smoke cleared away 
three of the big geese stayed behind. The water 
was only two or three feet deep in this part of 
the pond, and father waded out and brought them 
in, and we lay down to watch again, hoping 
another band might come. 

Sure enough, after a little another flock, larger 
than the first, lighted in the pond, but at the far- 
ther side from us, and we concluded to wait and 
see if they would not swim nearer. And it was 
well we did, for suddenly the very air seemed to 
be filled with geese, and our ears were almost 
deafened with the flapping of wings. It was a 
regular goose mob. There must have been many 
hundreds, and possibly thousands, in that flock 
which was passing over, and, seeing the open 
water, suddenly determined on camping for the 
night. They covered the pond all over. The 
very place was black with geese up to within a 
few feet of where we were lying in the brush. 
I am sure I could have run and jumped on the 
back of one before it could have gotten out of the 
way. I was so excited that it was hard to keep 
me from shouting. Father whispered to me that 
I was to shoot my rifle into the mass of geese, and 
then when they rose to fly he would shoot into the 


A BUDDING NIMROD 


43 


flock with his musket. What a time there was 
when that gun went off ! We took nine geese on 
that haul. Some of them only had a wing broken, 
and led father a great chase through the cold 
water. But at last he had them all in — twelve 
great geese, deliciously fattened on the stub- 
ble fields. Father carried the game home, and 
I carried the two guns. I would have thought 
they were pretty heavy, usually, but I was so ex- 
cited over our success, and especially that I had 
had a hand in it, and nobody could tell how many 
of those geese I had killed myself, that I seemed 
to walk on air, and the guns were light as feathers. 
I felt I was a full-fledged hunter from that day. 


VI 


A boy’s hunting tales 

On the Oregon frontier where the country was 
hilly and largely timbered, and especially so near 
my home, — where the mountains with their un- 
broken forests of from fifty to seventy miles in 
width and hundreds of miles in length were less 
than three hours’ walk distant, — it was a common 
thing for domestic animals to run wild and seem 
to lose all their knowledge of man and all memory 
of ever associating with him. The climate was 
mild, and there were at times several winters in 
succession when stock would live out in the woods 
and keep in very good condition without being fed 
from the farm. Sometimes horses and cattle would 
become as wild as deer and almost as hard to get 
back into the home pasture. It was especially a 
good country for hogs. There was a large amount 
of oak timber that yielded splendid crops of acorns. 
As it rains a good deal in the Willamette Valley, 
the ground is always soft enough for a hog to root 
well in the woods, and so they fared very well with- 
44 


A boy’s hunting tales 


45 


out any master. The next fall after my experience 
shooting geese with my father’s rifle, -the neighbors 
concluded to kill off some of the bands of wild 
hogs that had become very numerous in our neigh- 
borhood. No one could tell to whom these hogs 
belonged. One old sow after another had stolen 
away into the forests and reared her litter of pigs, 
and bringing them up there, they had come to be 
as wild and fierce as the wild hogs of Louisiana, 
or the famous wild boar which is considered to be 
such royal game in the forests of Germany. These 
hogs became so numerous that they were a great 
pest to the grain fields. A drove of wild hogs 
would come into the field at night and eat or 
trample down two or three acres of wheat, and 
slip back again before daylight into some dark 
canon or thick jungle-like undergrowth where they 
had their special camping-place. This summer 
and autumn they had been unusually bad in this 
way, and the neighbors agreed to set apart a week 
to hunting wild hogs. Every one was to have 
what he was able to kill. The younger hogs were, 
of course, excellent meat, as they were in good 
order. Usually the hunters went in groups, but 
one afternoon my father and I were hunting alone 
on a hillside where the timber was thick and 
the underbrush made it almost impossible to get 
through. Finally we heard a hog grunt, and, care- 


46 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


fully slipping along, we came in sight of them, and 
father shot one, wounding him. We had a dog 
with us, which I was leading, and we now let him 
loose. He ran in and caught one of the younger 
hogs, and while the others were dashing about 
defending him, father shot two others. Just then 
a big fierce old boar with great tusks came to the 
defence of his family, and struck the dog a terri- 
ble blow in the neck, cutting a gash far into his 
throat. The poor dog made a piteous howl, and 
we both ran closer to see if we could give him 
help. Father shot and killed another hog, when 
I foolishly went far enough ahead to get quite 
separated from him while he was loading his rifle. 
The angry old boar, having finished the poor dog, 
caught sight of me, and with a fierce grunt that 
made my hair stand straight on my head came 
crashing through the brush. I had no gun, for 
I was not yet considered big enough to be safe 
with one, and I thought my time had surely come. 
But I had no intention of being eaten by that old 
boar if I could help myself, and so I took to my 
heels and ran as fast as I could through the brush, 
screaming at every leap. It was not very good 
running for either of us, but the boar had the ad- 
vantage, and was within a few feet of me, snorting 
with rage, when I ran under a big oak limb that 
came down from a wide-spreading tree. It must 


A boy’s hunting tales 


47 


have been two or three feet above my head, but 
I jumped on it, catching it by my hands and fling- 
ing my legs over it, and scrambled up along the 
limb like a monkey. I was in the very nick of 
time, for that old hog threw some of the froth 
of his mouth on my legs as they went up over the 
limb. He tore around under the tree in a great 
rage, until father, who had been greatly frightened 
on my account, finished loading his old muzzle- 
loading rifle, and put a bullet through his vicious 
heart. I never in my life was quite so glad to see 
anything die. His chasing me was not the only 
grudge I had against him, for he had killed the 
best squirrel-dog I ever had. Poor old Bull ! We 
had had many a good time together, and when we 
went away and left him there in the thicket, my 
face was wet with tears for my old friend. 

It was a proud day for me when I was allowed 
to have a gun of my own. It was a small, second- 
hand, single-barrelled shotgun, one of the old-fash- 
ioned muzzle-loaders. It was not very much of 
a gun, but to me it was a great treasure. Father 
gave it to me in the early spring, when the big 
dark grouse were just coming down out of the 
mountains. The Oregon grouse is quite a large, 
strong bird. It winters back in the mountains, in 
the fir timber, where it feeds on the buds of the 
trees and comes to taste very much like them. 


48 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


Hunters who are searching for bear or deer in the 
mountains in the winter often find the grouse in 
the depths of the forests. They come down into 
the foot-hills along in the first days of spring, and, 
feeding on other things, soon lose their obnoxious 
flavor and become very delightful game for the 
table. One of the first memories of springtime, 
and one of the pleasantest that lives in my treas- 
ure-house of boyhood’s experiences, is the first 
hooting of the grouse as the winter was breaking. 
This hooting is the cry of the male grouse for his 
mate. His neck swells up like an old turkey-gob- 
bler’s, and with a wonderfully boastful strut *he 
brings a sound out of his swollen throat that is 
a kind of guttural “ hoot ! hoot ! hoot ! ” with quite 
a little pause between each sound. It is consider- 
able of a noise and can be heard for fully half a 
mile when the atmosphere is clear. I have gone 
out grouse-hunting about daylight in the morning 
when the old “hooters ” would be so thick in the 
woods that their voices would drown out every 
other sound, and it would be confusing to select 
any single one to look for out of so many. 

My first grouse came to his fate in a very 
accidental way. I was trying to slip up on an old 
“ hooter,” when a big grouse came flying through 
the timber and lighted in, a tree right over my 
head. It was a big curly-maple tree. The picture 



“ He Tore Around the Tree in a Great Rage.” Page 47. 





A boy’s hunting tales 


49 


of it is clear in my mind now, — from the squirrel 
hole under one of the great gnarled roots to the 
big crow’s nest on the topmost branch. The 
grouse did not see me, and stood up there on 
the limb with his great breast looking big as a 
turkey’s to my excited imagination. I took “a 
rest” along the side of a sapling that stood in 
front of me, and took good aim at the centre of 
its body. Father always shot their heads off with 
his rifle, and I used to do that later, but I did 
not take any risks on my first grouse. I was so 
excited that I could hear my heart beat, and I was 
afraid the grouse would hear it and get scared. 
But when the gun went off, down came the grouse, 
tumbling through the branches and falling almost 
at my feet. I was wild with delight. I didn’t 
stop to load my gun again, but with the grouse 
in one hand and the gun in the other I ran home 
as fast as I could to find somebody to share the 
joy of my success. 

Pheasant-hunting was always a great sport in 
the thick brush along the creek bottoms. The 
male pheasant has a fashion of selecting an old 
log. that has been blown down, where the timber 
is very thick, as his special domain. There he 
calls for his mate by beating with his wings either 
on his body or on the log. He begins with a 
slow, heavy beat, and then it gets more rapid. 


50 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


until in an almost imperceptible flutter the noise 
dies away among the trees. Many a time I have 
spent an hour creeping along as still as an Indian 
under the thick brush, to where I could get a 
glimpse of Mr. Pheasant, and then have him fly 
away through the timber before I could get a 
shot; but if I had all the pheasants here that 
didn’t get away from my gun, I could open a 
game market. A favorite way of hunting pheas- 
ants was with a little dog who was trained to 
stand and bark under the tree where they lighted. 
A pheasant will stand and peer down into a dog’s 
face and pay no attention at all to the hunter so 
long as the dog keeps barking. 

Coon-hunting was good sport in those oak hills. 
There were a great many hollow trees in the oak 
timber, and they make just exactly the sort of 
home a coon likes. Along in the early fall, when 
the harvesting was getting pretty well by, the 
younger men and boys used to make up parties 
and go coon-hunting at night. A good coon-dog 
was a great necessity, for a dog that was not 
trained would get off after rabbits or squirrels ; 
but a well-trained coon-dog rarely deceives his 
master. The coons feed at night, and the dogs 
would chase them into some tree, which the men 
would often cut down in order to get the coon. 
Then they would build a big fire, and roast corn 


A boy’s hunting tales 


51 


and potatoes, and sometimes broil the coon him- 
self over the coals, and have a great feast, which 
would often last until daylight, and time to get 
back to work at the harvesting. About the mid- 
dle of the afternoon they would look pretty sleepy, 
and would vow never to go coon-hunting again ; 
but they usually went when they had a chance. 

I shall never forget my first coon-hunt. It was 
in the daytime, and I was out grouse-hunting with 
my dogs and gun, and they began to bark at a 
small tree that had a hollow limb with a hole in 
it big enough for a coon to hide himself. I knew 
the dogs would not bark that way for squirrels, and 
decided at once that there must be a coon in that 
hollow limb. I left my gun, so that the dogs would 
remain, and walked about half a mile to the near- 
est house and got a neighbor boy. We each took 
an axe, and went back to catch the coon. It was 
a hot day, and we sweat like good fellows before 
we got the tree down. When the tree fell, the 
hollow limb broke open, and out sprang a beauti- 
ful striped animal which the dogs, having run away 
at the crash of the tree, now ran in to catch ; but it 
quietly turned its tail toward them and showered 
them and us with a perfume, the stench of which 
was so terrible that the dogs fairly howled for pain, 
and instead of seizing the animal ran and rubbed 
their noses in the grass. The wise plan for us 


52 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


would have been to do the same thing ; but instead 
I shot the polecat, for such it was, and then, being 
thoroughly saturated with the odor, the animal did 
not seem to smell very bad, and so we set to work 
and skinned it. I took the skin home, and was 
disgusted to find that the three or four people I 
met on the way held their noses and advised 
me to keep on the other side of the road ; but it 
was worse yet when I got home. Mother would 
not let me come into the house. She made me 
first go and bury my beautiful skunk skin, and 
then she put some clean clothes out on the porch 
and bade me go to the barn and change my rai- 
ment. Even my hair had to be scoured with soap- 
suds before I was permitted to be with the rest of 
the family. Everything I had had on had to be 
soaked for a week before the odor of my “coon- 
hunt” was banished. 


VII 


A hunter’s luck 

In the early days, living up in the foot-hills, on 
the edge of the mountains, as we did, there was 
always the chance of coming on wild animals of 
a sort that one did not care to meet unless pre- 
pared for them. Black bear were in great abun- 
dance, and the larger brown, or cinnamon, bear 
were not uncommon. Wildcats were nearly as 
plenty as the tame feline, and the large and fierce 
panther was a sort of haunting ghost in the im- 
agination of a boy, hovering about every dark 
canon. 

I remember that on one occasion I was hunting 
for pheasants, in company with my teacher and 
three or four of the boys of the neighborhood, 
when, as we were separated in the timber on the 
lookout for the birds, suddenly an enormous pan- 
ther leaped from a tree over my head, and only 
a few feet away. But he seemed as badly scared 
as I was, and went plunging away into the forest 
with long, cat-like springs. He gave me a terrible 
53 


54 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


fright. My hair stood on end for quite a while 
afterward. 

The wild pigeons furnished many of the most 
delightful hunting excursions of my youth. They 
used to come into our section of the country by 
hundreds of thousands, and were especially abun- 
dant about seeding-time in the spring, and again 
in the autumn. Sometimes they came in such 
great flocks as to cover the fields, and I have 
seen a forest of fifteen or twenty acres literally 
covered over with pigeons. I have sometimes 
killed all I was able to carry home. Later, when 
they were not so plentiful, I had to study their 
habits more. A pigeon has a great fondness for 
sitting on the point of a dead limb that stands up 
above the living branches of a tree. I know one 
old tree down in the Mary’s River bottom that had 
such a dead snag standing out prominently, where 
I have killed hundreds of pigeons.. It stood not 
far from the main travelled road, and was sur- 
rounded by splendid fields, and whenever pigeons 
were disturbed within a half a mile of it, several of 
them were sure to make for that old snag. I used 
to take my place underneath, where I was well 
hidden, with my shotgun, and shoot them at my 
ease until I had enough for a mess. 

What is known as the California quail was very 
abundant in Oregon, in those days, and is one of 


A hunter’s luck 


55 


the prettiest of birds, and one of the most fascinat- 
ing to the boy hunter. It is a much handsomer 
bird than its cousin, the “ Bob White.” It has 
a jaunty way of carrying itself, has a pretty top- 
knot, and goes courtesying along, bobbing its 
head in a very defiant and mocking way. It 
depends on its legs fully as much as on its wings 
to escape from its enemies. It can outrun any 
boy in the brush, and will be a hundred yards from 
where it lights in a twinkling. Many a hot chase 
have those little witches run me, but I got even 
with them once, and every boy is pot-hunter enough 
to think the end justifies the means. I had been 
hunting all one afternoon in the river bottom for 
pheasants, and was going home with only one bird, 
and was feeling tired and cross, and generally 
disgusted with myself, when, creeping under a 
thicket of young firs, between sundown and dark, 
I glanced overhead and saw what made my eyes 
stick out with wonder. I had come on a quails’ 
roosting-place. I don’t know how many there 
were there, but there must have been a dozen 
bevies of quail that had selected that dense ever- 
green thicket for their snug roost. I belched 
away with my little shotgun, where they were 
sitting thickest, and got three at the first shot. I 
had only expected to get one shot, but to my 
astonishment and delight the silly things were 


56 AN OREGON BOYHOOD 

SO confused in the semi-darkness that I killed 
thirty birds before they got sufficiently aroused 
to get out of their roosting-place for good. I 
never had taken home so many quails before, and 
my fame as a hunter went up several notches, not 
only at home but in all the neighborhood round 
about. 

Every autumn parties of the big boys and 
young men would go into the mountains to hunt 
for deer and bear. The deer were so plentiful 
that some men lived back in the mountains all 
winter and killed them just for their hides. In 
this way one man would slay from one to two 
hundred deer in a single winter, and with the 
exception of what he needed for food for himself 
and his dogs, leave the carcasses to be eaten by 
the wolves or the panthers. Two of our neighbors, 
young men, went up in the mountains, about ten 
miles from where we lived, one fall, for a week’s 
deer-hunting. They pitched their camp by a 
beautiful stream of water, caught a string of 
speckled trout for their supper, and settled them- 
selves down for fine sport. After the supper was 
over, one of the young men proposed that they 
should circle around a little heavily timbered 
mountain in front of them, as it was yet an hour 
or more before dark, and see if they could not get 
a deer. One took one side of the hill, and the 


A hunter’s luck 


57 


other went the other way, intending to make a 
circle and perhaps meet on the farther side. The 
young man who had made the proposition for the 
hunt had only gone about a half a mile when he 
saw a big buck, and fired at it, but only wounded 
^it. He was armed with one of the old-fashioned 
muzzle-loading rifles, and in his haste to load he 
rammed home the bullet without putting in any 
powder. In trying to pick some powder into the 
nipple at the base of the barrel back of the bullet, 
he broke the lock of his gun. His friend, hearing 
him shoot, and then not hearing anything more of 
him, fired off his own gun several times, and our 
young friend with the broken gun undertook to go 
to him, but in so doing became entirely lost. The 
other went back to camp, finally, and kept up a 
fire, and from time to time shot off his rifle 
through the night. The next day he hunted for 
his friend until afternoon, and then, becoming 
badly frightened, came back to the settlements 
and gave the alarm. Messengers rode all over the 
country that night, and fully one hundred men, 
my father among them, went to hunt for the lost 
youth. They divided themselves into parties, and 
planned a thorough search of the mountains. 
One or two of the parties went over the moun- 
tains and made a long trip clear through to the 
ocean, having an exceedingly hard tramp of it. 


58 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


But though the forests were honeycombed with 
these searching parties, they could find no trace of 
the man. After wandering about for eight days, 
having nothing to eat for all that time except 
licorice roots and a bird which a hawk had 
dropped on being frightened by a club he had, 
thrown at it, having been terrified by panthers 
on two nights, and almost insane from hunger and 
worry, he crept down to a clearing and up to the 
door of a log-cabin, where he fainted away on the 
door-step. The settlers kindly nursed him, and 
the husband carried the word of his recovery out 
to the foot-hills and valley beyond. The news 
spread rapidly that the lost was found, but some 
of the searching parties were over a week later in 
returning home. 

Sometimes* when the snow was deep in the 
mountains for a long time, the deer would come 
down into the foot-hills in large numbers. We 
once counted a band of forty passing through 
our orchard at one time. Some of them were 
immense bucks with long antlers, and some were 
not a year old yet, and altogether they made a 
beautiful sight. 

Among the young fellows a favorite way of 
hunting for deer was to watch for them when they 
came into the orchards and gardens in the fall. 
They were very fat at that season of the year. 


A hunter’s luck 


59 


and were easily taken by what was known as 
“ torch hunting.” I never killed a deer that way, 
but I once carried the torch for another boy. We 
split up some pitchwood from an old pine stump, 
and made a splendid torch. Such a torch will 
burn for a long time, and make a great light. 
Deer had been coming into the orchard near by 
to feed on the apples and on a big garden of peas 
adjoining, so we had good hopes of making a haul. 
We lighted the torch, and I carried it up over my 
head, while my friend walked just behind me with 
his gun. We slipped along as still , and quiet as 
we could, peering into the edge of the darkness 
around the lighted place made by the torch, until 
suddenly I caught a glimpse of the outlines of a 
big deer with wide-reaching horns, which looked 
more like a ghost-deer than a real one in the 
weird and vague light. He stared at us in great 
wonder, and did not show any intention of run- 
ning away. My friend knelt down beside me 
and, taking good aim, shot him through the heart. 
He made one great lunge into the air, and then 
fell heavily on his side, stone dead. At the sound 
of the gun and his fall, two or three others ran 
away through the darkness, but we did not get 
another shot. It was the largest and fattest deer 
I ever saw. 

I shall never forget my own first deer. I had 


6o 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


been deer-hunting a good many times, and had 
often seen them killed, but had never had any 
luck myself. Finally, I was put on a run-way 
to watch for a deer that was started up by the 
hounds. Deer are very tenacious in their habits. 
They have certain ways of going about through 
the forests, and will face almost any danger rather 
than to break away from their accustomed route. 
An old hunter can tell just about what a deer will 
do when it is pursued by dogs. On this occasion, 
the man who had charge of the hunt sent one man 
with the dogs over through a great forest, some 
three miles from the house, and then placed three 
of us to watch as many different run-ways which 
the deer frequented. He stationed me on a ridge, 
about fifty yards from a fence, behind a tree, and 
told me that any deer started up by the dogs 
within a certain portion of the forest beyond 
would certainly pass between an old dead snag 
and where the fence entered the brush fifty feet 
away. I watched with a great deal of interest 
for a while, but it became dull and lonesome after 
a time, and I was beginning to get sleepy, when 
suddenly I heard the hounds bellowing away on 
the trail. After that I kept awake and full of 
interest. In a few minutes the barking sounded 
louder, and I could tell by the noise that they 
were coming my way. All at once, over the fence 


A hunter’s luck 


6i 


leaped an enormous buck with magnificent, wide- 
spreading horns, and came to a full stop as he 
caught sight of me beside the tree. I never saw 
a finer sight in my life than that great deer, stand- 
ing with his head thrown back, and his nostrils 
panting hot steam. He took me so by surprise 
that I admired him a moment before I raised my 
gun to shoot. That moment saved his life, for, 
as I lifted my glm, he gave a great snort, leaped 
away to the right, and off he went down the hill. 
I fired after him, but I don’t suppose I came 
within ten feet of him. I was disgusted with my- 
self, but mechanically loaded my gun, and just as 
I got it loaded two other deer came bounding over 
the fence. Both were yearlings, — one a buck and 
the other a doe. They, too, halted for a moment 
on seeing me, and this time I held my admiration 
in abeyance, and sent a bullet through the buck’s 
shoulder, knocking it down, and as it struggled to 
its feet again, I quickly slipped in another car- 
tridge, and put a ball through its head. The doe 
bounded away unhurt at the first shot. 

Although I had seen deer, and been accustomed 
to their hunting all my life, this was the first 
.one I had killed myself, and I was wild with ex- 
citement and delight. The great Bismarck says 
that the proudest moment of his boyhood was 
when he killed his first hare; but I am sure a 
first deer would greatly discount a hare. 


VIII 


THE LOG-BOOK OF A YOUNG FISHERMAN 

We lived during my younger boyhood about 
midway between two streams, being about a mile 
distant from either. Both of them abounded in 
fish : one in trout exclusively, and the other in trout 
and chubs and suckers. This latter stream, which 
was the favorite haunt of my boyhood days, had 
been for a great many years, perhaps for a cen- 
tury or more, dammed up by the beavers. These 
interesting little animals had with their sharp teeth 
gnawed off hundreds of trees near the ground, and 
made a most formidable dam, which by constant 
oversight they kept in a good state of repair. Peo- 
ple who are not accustomed to the beaver would 
hardly believe the truth concerning the way in 
which they will fell trees and drift them into a 
proper position for forming the base work of their 
dam, and then with infinite patience bring small 
underbrush by the wagon load, and weave it in 
between the logs, and then over this daub it with 
dirt, which they pack down with their flat, smooth 
62 



“They too, haltctl for a Moment on seeing- Me.” Page 61 






THE LOG-BOOK OF A YOUNG FISHERMAN 63 

tails, which are equal to a mason’s trowel. The 
beavers live in families, and the families work 
together in colonies, and are certainly the most 
industrious and cunning of all the animals it has 
ever been my pleasure to become acquainted with. 

A long slough of back water, very deep, and 
from fifty to two hundred feet in width, had been 
thrown out opposite our farm, for two or three 
miles, by the beavers, and many of the most in- 
teresting hours of all my youth were spent there 
fishing. The work of the beavers was a constant 
delight to me. Many a time I have seen a beaver 
slip into the water down a well-worn slide, under 
the overhanging willows, and swim away, keeping 
sometimes two or three feet underneath, all the 
way across the stream. At other times I have seen 
them swimming with a green branch that had been 
cut for use on their dam. 

The muskrats, too, abounded, and every little 
while a sly mink would slide his long dark body, 
like a cunning shadow, swiftly through the bushes. 
Only once, there, I saw a beautiful pair of otters. 
The mink did not always confine themselves to the 
water, but sometimes paid attention to the hen- 
roost. On one occasion, fourteen chickens and 
two ducks in our old log hen-house had their 
throats cut in a single night, and were found lying 
there dead in the morning. Father thought it 


64 AN OREGON BOYHOOD 

might be the work of weasels, but on taking up 
the floor of the chicken-house, a big mink ran out 
on top of the house, and fell at a shot from his 
rifle. My mother made his lovely robe of fur into 
a collar and cuffs for my winter coat, to my great 
pride and delight. 

But I have strayed from the fishing-pole. Many 
a splendid string of fish did I bring away that had 
been lured to my hook, usually by a grasshopper 
bait. Later, I used to have great sport in catching 
suckers in another way. We would take a piece 
of annealed copper wire, and tie one end of it to a 
pole stiff and strong, and eight or ten feet in length. 
On the other end of the wire, which was long 
enough to go to the bed of the stream without 
putting the pole in the water, we would arrange a 
slip-noose several inches across, and then slowly 
and quietly let the noose down in front of the 
suckers as they were feeding on the bottom of 
the stream. The fish did not seem to see the wire 
at all, and if they were moving would work them- 
selves straight into the noose if held in front of 
their heads. If the fish were quiet, we would 
slowly work the noose back until they were well 
inside of it, and then suddenly jerk it tight. You 
never saw such an astonished fish as that sucker 
was then. It was like a flash of lightning out of 
a clear sky to him. But the fun of it for the boy 


THE LOG-BOOK OF A YOUNG FISHERMAN 65 

was that the more the fish wriggled and tried to 
get away, the tighter the wire held him. In that 
manner I have caught many suckers that would 
weigh from three to four pounds each. 

Another scheme which we country boys had for 
catching fish has been prohibited by law now for 
many years, and very properly so, for it did not 
give the fish a fair chance. We bought at the 
drug-stores what were known in common lan- 
guage as “fish berries,” though they had some 
other long Latin name. We took these and 
pounded them up, and mixed them into soft 
dough made of flour and water. Armed each 
with a piece of dough as big as his fist, two or 
three wide-awake boys, in reach of a well-stocked 
fish stream, were good for all the fish they could 
carry home. The favorite place for operations 
was where there was a large deep hole in the 
river, where there were likely to be big fish, and 
which ended in shallow water. We would then 
strip ourselves so as to be ready to wade or swim, 
and break off our fish-dough into little bits, and 
throw these in at the upper end of the hole. In 
a few minutes some of the fish would be sure to 
come up to the top of the water, and swirl around, 
playing all sorts of silly antics, acting as though 
they were drunk ; and, indeed, that was just what 
was the matter with them. If they had not got 

F 


66 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


very much of the dough, the effect would soon 
wear off, and they would go on about their busi- 
ness ; but if they had a good dose of it, they would 
play about a little, and then turn over on their 
backs and float at the top of the water. As soon 
as they began to come up, we would wade in at 
the mouth of the pool, and catch them as they 
drifted down, and immediately dress them, so as 
to prevent the drug in the dough from injuring 
the flesh. I have spent many a merry afternoon 
in that way, and been one of half-a-dozen boys 
to carry home all we could pack. I can see now 
it was a very unfair advantage to take of the fish, 
and very unsportsman-like, but to a frontier boy 
all is fair in love and war, and most of his living 
is got by war on the denizens of the forests and 
brooks about him. 

The salmon did not come up on our side of the 
Coast Range Mountains, as they were stopped 
by the falls in the Willamette River at Oregon 
City; but just over the mountains they came up 
the streams that emptied into the Pacific Ocean 
nearer to us, and the settlers often made trips 
across the mountains in the fishing season, and 
brought home loads of salmon. I once went with 
my father and two other men, in a big covered 
wagon with four horses hitched to it, on a fishing 
trip to the Alsea Valley. It was about forty 


THE LOG-BOOK OF A YOUNG FISHERMAN 6/ 

miles from our place, and a long day’s drive over 
the rough, muddy mountain roads, in the late fall, 
after the rainy season had begun. We did not 
get to the house where we were to put up at night, 
and from which we were to do our fishing, until 
long after dark, though we had started before day. 
This house was on the bank of the Alsea River, 
which, after the two weeks of heavy rains, was a 
very swollen and turbulent stream. The man as- 
sured us that the fish were running well, and I 
dreamed of salmon that night, and was up and 
dressed before daylight, ready to take my luck 
with the men. 

The settler rowed us across the river in the 
morning, in his big, flat-bottomed boat, and guided 
us to the mouth of a. little stream that came down 
through a big dark canon on the other side. It 
was only a little brook, ordinarily, but was now 
much swollen by the rains. The vining maples 
twined in so close about it that we had to get right 
in the water and follow up the stream. Two of 
the men had spears, which they had bought from 
the Indians. They were made out of bone, and 
fitted over the end of a pole. There was a buck- 
skin string about a foot long, with one end tied to 
the spear and the other end tied to the pole, and 
when the spear was thrust into a salmon he would 
run away with the bone part, but the string held 


68 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


him fast. Father and I, not being able to find 
any spears to purchase, cut two stout clubs, with 
which we struck the fish over the head a smart 
blow. If struck in the right place, just at the 
base of the head, it turned him over on his back 
every time. These proved so much more effec- 
tive than the spears that the others soon -threw 
them away and took clubs also. 

I have never known a day of such exciting 
sport as that was. The salmon were just plenti- 
ful enough to keep us alert and strung up, watch- 
ing for them, and yet not sufficiently abundant to 
make it cloy on us. We would find them, usually, 
in the deeper water, just below the riffle, and 
would endeavor to run them on to the next riffle 
above, where we could get a good stroke and kill 
them without bruising them unnecessarily; but 
sometimes they would turn on us, and come down 
the stream, and a big salmon weighing twenty-five 
or thirty pounds, with full head of steam on, 
going down over a riffle, is rather a formidable 
enemy. I was knocked down several times that 
day by a salmon striking my shins, and not one 
of the men escaped a fall from the same cause. 
Sometimes we would slip and go down into a 
deep hole, and go clear under, head and all ; and 
then how the rest would laugh and poke fun at 
the unlucky victim ! The salmon would hide under 





“ Wc S-truck the Fish a Sharp Blow.” Page 68. 






THE LOG-BOOK OF A YOUNG FISHERMAN 69 

an overhanging bank, occasionally, and we would 
scare them out with our clubs. I ran my hand 
down alongside of one, intending to put my fingers 
in his gills, but got my hand in his mouth instead, 
and received a cut from his sharp teeth that did 
not heal for many a day. 

As fast as we killed the salmon, we hung them 
on the limbs of the trees bending over the stream, 
and pushed on. So exciting was the sport, and 
so constantly varied our experiences, that we did 
not think about the flight of time, until, on paus- 
ing, we found it was three o’clock in the after- 
noon, and we had started in at daylight. Then 
we started back down the stream, gathering up 
our salmon as we went, stringing them through 
the gills, on long, slender branches with a fork at 
the end. In that way, one could pull a great load 
of flsh in the water. When we reached the mouth 
of the little creek, we found we had taken one 
hundred and twenty salmon, of all sizes, making 
not less than 2000 pounds weight of fish which 
we had captured that day. Next day we found 
that it was all four horses could pull over the 
mountains. 

It was long after dark before we got over the 
river, and had a chance to think about supper. 
How hungry we were ! We had taken no lunch 
with us, and had had nothing to eat since before 


70 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


daylight. We skinned two fair-sized salmon — 
not big ones, but of a good size — and cooked 
them in the frying-pan over the great log fire. 
I ha.ve had many a good meal since then. I 
have feasted at Delmonico’s, have sampled salmon 
fresh out of the river at the Grand Causeway 
Hotel in Ireland, and come with a good appetite 
to the Trossachs in Scotland, but never have I 
tasted fish that seemed so perfectly delicious as 
those Alsea salmon which I devoured after a 
twelve hours’ fast, spent in the most violent exer- 
cise, drenched to the skin in cold water nearly 
all the while. 


IX 


WIGWAM AND FISH-SPEAR 

Although my adventure in the Alsea Valley 
was my first experience in catching salmon, it was 
by no means my last. One of the liveliest little 
sporting incidents that I remember was the capture 
of a big salmon trout in a little trout brook running 
into the Umpqua River. I was fishing for trout 
with a slender little rod, and a delicate brown 
hackle, when, as I came around a little dam which 
a family of beavers had thrown across the stream, 
I saw in the pool below me a splendid specimen of 
salmon trout. I doubt if there is a prettier fish 
in the world than a salmon trout. I delighted my 
eyes in looking on him, and then began to wonder 
and try to invent some means of capturing him. 
I knew that even if he would bite at my small 
hook, it would only be to lose my tackle, and that 
I must contrive some other way. I finally hit upon 
a plan, and dropping my pole and line on the bank, 
and getting a green branch, I dropped into the 
water at the lower end of the pool, and brought 

71 


;2 AN OREGON BOYHOOD 

the branch down on the water with such a sudden 
splash as to frighten him up against the beaver 
dam ahead. As I had hoped, he undertook to 
hide himself under the irregular logs that the 
beavers had thrown across the stream, and in that 
way soon had himself in a trap. The water 
became very roiled, but I felt about for him, and 
at last clutched him by the tail with both hands. 
But just- as I was going to throw him on the bank, 
he gave a sudden wriggle, and slipped into the 
water. Away he went down the stream, and I 
after him, pell mell. There was a long riffle some 
twenty yards below the pool, with scarcely water 
enough on it for him to get over the rocks, and on 
that I headed him off, and he was glad to get back 
into the pool again. He was rather chary of try- 
ing to hide in the dam a second time; but as I 
kept urging him from behind, he finally slipped 
back into the old trap. I had learned this time by 
experience, and taking my pocketknife, I cut a 
little hole in the flesh above the tail, while he was 
wedged' in among the logs. This gave me a good 
grip with one finger, and by that purchase I was 
able to throw him far out on the bank. He was 
a fine fish, and turned the scales at eight pounds 
and a half. 

Up in the Walla Walla Valley, in the state of 
Washington, the salmon go up the streams flowing 


WIGWAM AND FISH-SPEAR 


73 


into the Columbia River, and follow back the little 
brooks into the Blue Mountains until the bed of 
the streani is so small and narrow that they do not 
have room to turn around. I have gone many a 
time with another young fellow, each of us armed 
with a pitchfork, and followed up a little stream 
only a few miles from the city of Walla Walla, in 
salmon-running time, and in the course of an hour 
or so we would spear with our pitchforks and throw 
out on the bank as many fish as we could carry 
home. When we had all we wanted, we would 
string them through the gills on the fork handle, 
and then carry them between us, with one end of 
the fork on the shoulders of each, in the same 
way that the Hebrew spies carried the bunches 
of grapes out from the Promised Land. 

The Columbia River is famous the world over 
for its salmon fishing, although, to the great sor- 
row of Western sportsmen, the salmon there will 
not take a hook as they will in Eastern rivers. 
There are a number of favorite ways of capturing 
salmon. Wherever there is rapid water on the 
Columbia, and there are a number of waterfalls 
in its long course, .the Indians gather in large 
numbers, set up their wigwams, and catch the 
salmon and smoke and dry them for their store of 
winter food. With large numbers of the Ind- 
ians, salmon is the staff of life. A great many 


74 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


of them gather at the Cascades every year in the 
fishing season. 

The Cascades of the Columbia are one of the 
wonders of the world in splendor of natural 
scenery. No description can ever do justice to 
this marvellous panorama of nature. Imagine, if 
you can, a great river exulting in the irresistible 
power of a hundred allies, gathered into its bosom 
in its march of a thousand miles and more, through 
mountains, plains, and valleys, hurling its torrents 
sheer through one of the most massive mountain 
chains of the globe. The walls rise 4000 feet on 
either side. The streams of water come pouring 
from the melting glaciers of Mount Hood on the 
one hand, or Mount Adams on the other, and 
tumble their dark green floods over the lofty 
heights above you in wild profusion. Ever and 
anon the rollicking sea-winds catch these reckless 
streams, and tear and scatter them into a feathery 
wreath of helpless spray. And then again, on 
some granite cliff, they gather their distracted 
waters, only to fall to the river’s bed a thousand 
feet below. Joaquin Miller sings of this inspiring 
scene one of his most artistic songs : 

“ See once Columbia’s scenes, then roam no more ; 

No more remains on earth to cultured eyes ; 

The cataract comes down, a broken roar, 

The palisades defy approach, and rise 


WIGWAM AND FISH-SPEAR 


75 


Green-moss’d and dripping to the clouded skies. 

The canon thunders with its full of foam, 

And calls loud-mouth’d, and all the land defies ; 

The mounts make fellowship and dwell at home 
In snowy brotherhood beneath their purple dome; 

“ The rainbows swim in circles round, and rise 
Against the hanging granite walls till lost 
In drifting dreamy clouds and dappled skies, 

A grand mosaic intertwined and toss’d 
Along the mighty canon, bound and cross’d 
By storms of screaming birds of sea and land ; 

The salmon rush bfelow, bright red and boss’d 

In silver. Tawny, tall, on either hand 

You see the savage spefirman nude and silent stand. 

“ Here sweep the wild waters, cold and white 
And blue in their far depths ; divided now 
By sudden swift canoe as still and light 
As feathers nodding from the painted brow 
That lifts and looks above the imaged prow. 

Ashore you hear the pappoose shout at play ; 

The curl’d smoke comes from underneath the bough 
Of leaning fir : the wife looks far away. 

And sees a swift sweet bark divide the dashing spray.” 

In the salmon-fishing season, out on nearly 
every sharp rock jutting into the current, along 
the seven miles of rapids at the Cascades, there 
used to be an Indian with a long pole in his hands, 
and on the end of the pole a hand-net. With this 
pole grasped sturdily, he would bring the net 
down under the water, giving it a long sweep, and 


76 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


out again ; repeating this over and over, hour after 
hour, the only sound escaping from him being an 
occasional guttural “ ugh ! ugh ! ” 

When I was a boy, the farmers used to laugh 
over the story of how the eccentric George Francis 
Train came out to Oregon on a lecture trip, and 
some of his admirers went with him up to the 
Cascades to see the scenery. He proudly imag- 
ined he could handle a salmon net as well as a 
native, and, borrowing the net of an Indian, he 
went out on the edge of a slippery rock jutting 
into the river, where the water was boiling and 
surging, to try the experiment. He had not, how- 
ever, properly appreciated the tremendous power 
of the Columbia River current, for no sooner had 
his net and pole struck the water than he per- 
formed a somersault and landed head first in the 
^ foaming flood. His friends fished him out a hun- 
dred yards below, a very much colder and wetter, 
but not a much wiser, man. 

Another story which used to greatly please the 
frontiersmen was one which old Governor Gibbs, 
the Governor of Oregon in war times, related at 
the expense of Vice President Colfax. During the 
term of his Vice Presidency, Mr. Colfax made an 
extended tour of the Northwest, and was naturally 
shown a great deal of courtesy and attention by 
the politicians and government officials. The Gov- 


WIGWAM AND FISH-SPEAR 


77 


ernor and other official gentlemen accompanied 
the Vice President up through the Cascades, and 
on to Celilo, some fifty miles above, where the 
entire river pours its flood through a very narrow 
channel in an exceedingly graceful and beautiful 
waterfall. About the falls at Celilo there is a vast 
deal of sand, and in the spring and autumn the 
wind blows a great deal, and piles the sand up into 
the most toy-like and ideal-looking little sand moun- 
tains. In the old geographies which I studied in 
my boyhood, therfe were pictures of sharply defined 
cones running up to a needle point, and marked 
underneath “Volcanoes.” Since I have come to 
be a man I have climbed real volcanoes, but have 
never seen any resemblance between them and 
those early pictures. But when I first saw the 
sand-hills at Celilo, I exclaimed, “There are the 
volcanoes of my geography ! ” Now when the water 
is high, as it usually is in salmon-fishing time, the 
overflow water at the Falls of Celilo runs about 
among the sand-hills in the most beautiful streams, 
resembling ideal trout brooks. Mr. Colfax had 
heard so much about the salmon fishing in the 
Columbia that he was very desirous to be able, on 
his return to Washington, to boast of having him- 
self speared a “ Chinook ” salmon in his native 
waters. Willing to do anything to please him, 
the Governor and his staff of entertainers placed 
the Vice President down beside one of these little 


78 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


overflow streams, where he was in no danger of 
getting a wetting, and giving him a spear, told him 
to be on the lookout. Then one of them slipped 
away and bought a fine big salmon which an Indian 
had just taken out of his net, and put it into 
the little stream Mr. Colfax was watching, only a 
few yards below, but around the sand-hill out of 
sight of that distinguished fisherman. True to 
its instincts, the salmon, glad to have another 
chance at life, pushed its way up stream toward 
Mr. Colfax. He Speared it with a great deal of 
excitement and pride, and, flushed with success, 
declared he must have another. While he was 
anxiously watching the water, one of the politicians^ 
slipped the salmon into the stream again ; and Mr. 
Colfax, thinking he was doing “ land office busi- 
ness, had speared that poor salmon thirteen times, 
and the unlucky fish was pretty badly used up, 
before he discovered the huge joke which they 
had been playing upon him. 

The Indians become very expert in throwing a 
salmon spear, and are certain of a fish which they 
have a fair chance at, if it is within two or three 
feet of the top of the water. Sometimes a white 
man becomes as expert in spearing salmon as an 
Indian ; but one thing you may always be sure of, 
that a white man who can throw a fish-spear equal 
to an Indian is not likely to be good for anything 
else. 


X 


WATERWHEELS AND FISH-NETS 

The Columbia River is not only one of the 
most beautiful streams in the world, but rising 
as it does in the heart of the Rocky Mountains, 
and flowing for hundreds of miles through vast 
mountain ranges, receiving many tributaries that 
are fed from the great wastes of snow stretching 
over millions of square miles of unexplored moun- 
tain regions, it receives into its bosom in the 
spring and early summer such enormous quan- 
tities of water that it is often unable to carry it. 
At the Cascades the Columbia often rises sixty 
feet above the ordinary stage of the river. I was 
at the Dalles one time, forty miles above the 
Cascades, when the mass of extra water super- 
imposed on the ordinary stage of the river was 
fifty-one feet thick and over a mile wide, moving 
at the rate of nine miles per hour. For several 
days it rose at the rate of an inch an hour. Its 
hourly increase would have made a stream equal 
to the Merrimac, and its daily rise was more than 
equal to such a river as the Hudson. 

79 


So 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


It is through this great spring and summer 
flood that the fish swarming out of the Pacific 
Ocean hasten toward the mountain streams to 
find their spawning grounds. The smelt season 
is specially interesting. They sometimes come up 
the river in such enormous quantities as to almost 
fill the stream. In Vancouver once, seven miles 
across the peninsula from Portland, the smelt 
were so abundant in the river that the farmers 
came in their wagons and hauled home wagon 
loads of these delicious fish, using what they could 
for food, and the rest to fertilize their gardens. 
The boys would take a broom handle for a pole, 
and taking a hoop from the top of a barrel or 
keg, get their mothers to sew a piece of cheese 
cloth loosely on one side of the hoop for a net, 
and standing by the edge of the river bank would 
scoop out a dozen or more great, fine smelt at a 
time. Running with the smelt that year were a 
great many very small fish, about the size of ordi- 
nary sardines. In scooping one would get two 
or three of these to every one of the large fish. 
These little minnows, or whatever they were, had 
remarkable tenacity of life. I went down to the 
river one afternoon, with a hand-net made accord- 
ing to the description I have given, and in a few 
minutes scooped up a basketful of fish, making 
as heavy a load as I could carry. I took them 


WATERWHEELS AND FISH-NETS 


8 


home and set them out in the woodshed where 
they would keep cool, and the next forenoon when 
I poured them out of the basket, the little fish 
sandwiched in everywhere between the larger ones 
were alive and wriggled about in great commo- 
tion. Out of curiosity I gathered them up and 
put them into a pan of water, and they swam 
about in apparently as good condition as when 
taken from the river. They had received enough 
moisture in being with the other fish to keep 
alive. 

The great interest, however, commercially and 
otherwise, centres in the run of salmon. In addi- 
tion to the spear which the Indians and occasional 
fishermen use for capturing the salmon, another 
popular method is the fish wheel. If an Eastern 
traveller were out on the Columbia in low-water 
season, he would see some things hard to under- 
stand. Away out on some sand or gravel bar, 
perhaps a hundred yards from the water, high 
and dry in the air, would be disclosed a big 
waterwheel, and running away from it a long 
wooden flume extending back to the high land. 
But if one is there in high-water season when 
the fish are coming up, he will see that this big 
wheel is in the midst of the current, gathering 
up its buckets full of water as it revolves, and 
dipping every unlucky salmon that comes in its 


82 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


way, pouring water and fish out to be carried off 
to the high land where they are taken care of. 
Large numbers of fish are taken in these wheels. 
I remember seeing a story in the Portland Ore- 
gonian a number of years ago which declared 
that fifteen hundred salmon had been taken in 
one of these wheels in the twenty-four hours of 
a single day. This big fish story was well fortified 
with affidavits. I am frank to say that my name 
was not attached to any of the affidavits. 

Still another kind of wheel is attached to a flat- 
bottomed boat or scow, which is so fashioned that 
the wheel turns with the current, pouring out the 
water in such a way as to leave the fish in the 
boat. A large part of . the salmon for the local 
markets in my Oregon days were caught in these 
wheels. 

But the salmon fishing of commerce, which has 
business relations with the entire civilized world, 
is done by means of nets. For many miles up 
from the mouth of the Columbia River, almost 
every bend in the river, where it is easy to estab- 
lish one, has a cannery. These canneries have in 
connection with them a large number of boats and 
fishing-nets, which they hire out to fishermen. As 
the fishing season draws near, rude and weather- 
beaten men, who are accustomed to the sea and 
fishing, gather from all parts of the world to try 


WATERWHEELS AND FISH-NETS 83 

their luck after the salmon. Two men go in 
partnership, as in the early mining days, and hire 
a boat together. Their wages depend altogether 
on their “ luck,” as they get so much apiece for 
the fish they bring in. The nets are so arranged 
by law that a salmon below a certain number of 
pounds in weight will pass through unharmed. 

Astoria — a city ten miles up from the mouth 
of the river, which was named after old John 
Jacob Astor in the fur-gathering days, when his 
hunters and trappers were searching for beaver 
and otter and mink skins along the little streams 
making into the Columbia — is a wonderfully busy 
place in the salmon-fishing season. The fishermen 
in its streets speak nearly every language in the 
world, though a great many of them are Swedes 
and Norwegians, and have been trained to fish 
for salmon in their own northern land. I have 
been in Astoria when the entire river, which is 
there seven miles across, seemed, when looking 
out toward the sea, ten miles away, almost black 
with fishing boats and nets. 

The fishermen press down to the very mouth 
of the river in fierce rivalry with one another, 
each one looking out for the main chance and 
trying to get the first strike at the salmon as they 
come into the river. They run a great deal of 
risk in this way, and often pay for their reckless- 


84 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


ness with their lives. If a sudden storm comes 
up, their boats are likely to be capsized ; or if the 
tide changes while they are near the bar, they 
may be swept out to sea. Scores have thus been 
swept out over the bar, never to be heard of 
again. Sometimes they have great good fortune 
and escape by the most hair-breadth experiences. 
Once when I was in Astoria, a couple of Irishmen 
were carried out over the bar just after they had 
taken their load of fish and nets on board. Their 
companions gave them up for lost, and that night 
had a great wake in their honor. The two pad- 
dies, however, had their own ideas as to the time 
having arrived for their wake. They were both 
very strong and courageous men, and rowed their 
boat around to the Washington side of the coast, 
and took the desperate chances of pushing it 
straight through the heavy surf on the sandy 
beach. Fortunately for them, an unusually strong 
wave hurled them far enough up on the beach 
so that they were able to drag their boat out of 
the way before the next wave came. They hired 
a farmer to hitch up his team, and, fastening their 
boat on the running gear of his wagon, he hauled 
it across the point and put them safely in the 
river again. And it so happened that about two 
o’clock in the morning, when their wake was at 
its height, they turned up to enjoy it themselves, 


WATERWHEELS AND FISH-NETS 85 

with their boat-load of fish, nets, and all in good 
condition. It isn’t every man that gets an oppor- 
tunity to attend his own wake. 

The seals follow the salmon in from tlie sea, 
and add a great deal of interest to the fishing 
season, though it is a very unpleasant and unwel- 
come interest, to the fisherman on account of the 
destruction which they work among the nets. The 
seals follow the salmon for over a hundred miles 
up the river ; and one of the sights from the decks 
of the river steamboats is to watch for the seals 
as they poke their black heads above the water. 
Thousands of sea-gulls, too, follow, ready to feed 
on any fish that falls a victim to the seals and is 
not entirely eaten by them, or to pounce upon 
the many that die in their hard struggle to get up 
the river. It is a paradise for the big fish-hawk, 
which is in great evidence. 

Another pest to the salmon nets is the sturgeon 
that sometimes get in them. The sturgeon is well 
worth fishing for on his own account, but he plays 
havoc with the salmon nets. Sturgeon of very 
large size are sometimes taken here. It used to 
be no uncommon thing to see fish hanging in the 
markets that would weigh from two to three hun- 
dred pounds. Some fishermen once fastened their 
sturgeon lines to a big snag in the Willamette 
River near its mouth. The snag was so firmly 


86 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


imbedded that the government snag-puller had 
not been able to pull it out; but a sturgeon got 
hooked on that line, which was so strong that he 
managed to get some sort of a purchase on it, 
and pulled the snag loose. They .finally captured 
him, and he has the reputation of being the 
largest sturgeon ever taken on the Pacific Coast. 
He weighed seven hundred pounds. 

I was once on the coast above the mouth of the 
Columbia River in the fishing season, when an 
enormous sea-lion was swept up on the shore at 
night. He had been wounded by a bullet, no 
doubt from a pistol in the hands of a fisherman, 
and had afterwards died, and the tide had thrown 
him out where I found him. He was as big as an 
ox, and I had a great desire to save his skin for a 
rug. I hired two men to help me, and we worked 
several hours skinning the monster. I rolled the 
hide up and took it home with me that evening on 
the steamer, but the weather was so warm that, to 
my great disgust and disappointment, it spoiled 
before I could get it into the hands of some one 
to cure it for me. 


XI 


TENT AND CAMP 

Among the pictures that are indelibly impressed 
on my memory, are the old-fashioned covered 
wagon, the canvas tent, and the camp-fire by the 
roadside or by some babbling brook in the woods. 
My father and mother had both become greatly 
enamoured of camping out and of tent life in their 
long trip across the plains, and not a year of my 
boyhood passed without experiences of that sort. 
It was not only that we went every year to the big 
camp-meeting, but often in the summer, when the 
blackberries were at their best in the mountains, 
groups of neighbors would go up into the forests 
for a few days’ outing, and fish and hunt and can 
up the wild blackberries for the coming winter. 
Indeed, that is a great custom in the Willamette 
Valley to this day. Thousands of families go into 
the Cascade Mountains every summer and camp 
out for a week or two in the biggest berry patch 
there is on the globe. Tens of thousands of acres 
of forest in these mountains have been burned over 
87 


88 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


by forest fires, and wherever the fires have gone 
the ground is covered with wild blackberry vines, 
climbing up and over the fire-blackened logs, mak- 
ing a green berry garden for hundreds of miles 
in length and twenty miles or more in width. The 
people take the jars and sugar with them, and, 
building big camp-fires, prepare their fruit for 
the table there in the mountains. 

The black bear is also very fond of the berries, 
and abounds at that season of the year. These 
animals are, however, so well fed that they do not 
usually give the berry-pickers any trouble unless 
they are cornered and compelled to fight in self- 
defence, yet when wounded or fretted in any way 
they become almost as dangerous as a grizzly. 
One day a young neighbor of ours was out black- 
berrying, having taken only a bird gun with him, 
when he suddenly discovered a black bear which 
was enjoying itself feasting on the luscious ripe 
berries. The wind was blowing from the bear to 
the boy, and he was able to slip up very close 
without being discovered. The foolish fellow, 
with more recklessness than courage, thought by 
shooting his load of shot into the bear’s head, he 
would stand a good chance to kill it by hitting it 
in the eye. As a matter of fact he only stirred 
up the bear and made it mad, and instead of run- 
ning away it came plunging through the vines 





1 







TENT AND CAMP 


89 

Straight for its enemy. A black bear has a most 
amusing way of running, but it did not seem funny 
at all to my young friend that day. He threw away 
his gun and climbed up a little tree which was fort- 
unately near, just in time to escape the ugly grin- 
ning teeth of bruin. The youngster thought his 
troubles were all over when he discovered that the 
tree was too small for the bear to climb after him, 
for he supposed of course the bear would soon 
tire of watching him and go off about its busi- 
ness. But the bear, every time it scratched its 
head where some of the shot had punched holes 
through its tough hide, seemed to get more angry, 
and settled itself down to stay by that tree. It 
was early in the afternoon, and at first the young 
fellow did not undertake to attract any attention, 
for he knew the campers would laugh at him for 
being “treed by a bear,” but after being in a most 
uncomfortable position for three or four hours, 
the bear showing no sign of a disposition to 
raise the siege, he began to halloo as loud as he 
could, hoping to be heard by the people at camp, 
but to no avail, as the camp was over a mile away. 
He called till he was so hoarse that he could 
scarcely speak, but no one came to his relief. As 
the sun went down and twilight came on he be- 
came very hungry, but there sat bruin at the foot 
of the tree, every little while opening his mouth 


90 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


and showing his teeth in a most suggestive way, 
indicating that he was hungry, too, and giving 
every evidence of his purpose to stand by until he 
got his meal. It gets very cold in the mountains 
at night, even in the summer, and the boy in his 
shirt-sleeves crouched on the limb of the tree and 
shivered until his teeth chattered, but bruin stayed 
by through all the long night. Just as the sun 
came up in the morning he seemed to lose hope 
of getting fresh meat in that quarter, and, giving 
a big grunt, plunged off down the hill. The young 
fellow crept down from his perch with stiffened 
limbs and gaunt stomach, a very much wiser bear- 
hunter than he had been the day before. He 
recovered his gun and slipped into camp, a shame- 
faced youth ; but as they had been greatly fright- 
ened about him, he met with a warm welcome, 
though the neighbor boys chaffed him on his 
“ sitting up ” with a she-bear for a long time. 

Sometimes we would encounter some very novel 
experiences in these mountain camping trips. I 
once went with a company of young folks for a 
day’s picnic in the mountains, and we camped for 
our lunch in a rocky creek bottom and spread out 
a tablecloth over some bowlders where the grass 
grew up among them. Our luncheon was placed 
on this cloth, and we all gathered around it, squat- 
ting on the ground. We had a jolly time with the 


TENT AND CAMP 


91 


lunch, as young people will when out on a picnic, 
but just as we had concluded and one of the girls 
had lifted a plate from the improvised table, we 
were startled to hear a very significant rattle from 
underneath. There was a great scurrying, and 
when we carefully pulled the tablecloth away 
there was an enormous rattlesnake curled up 
within a foot of where one of the young women 
had been seated. We killed him, and I remember 
he had ten rattles, and was a very ugly sort of an 
enemy to have skulking under the table. 

We lived, in my early boyhood, about a hundred 
miles south of Portland, which was then, as now, 
the chief city of Oregon. My father sometimes 
went in the late autumn to Portland to obtain sugar 
and coffee and such necessaries as could be pur- 
chased a great deal cheaper there than in the little 
country store near our farm. He would often 
take with him a wagon load of bacon, which had 
been fattened on the acorns in the oak woods and 
cured in the old-fashioned smoke house — one of 
the outbuildings of every frontier farm. At other 
times he would take a load of chickens, and occa- 
sionally a load of turkeys, and these were usually 
exchanged for the groceries and things needed at 
home. I was always permitted to go with him on 
these trips. At night we would camp out beside 
the road, buying hay for the horses from some 


92 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


farmer, and sleeping under the wagon. If it 
rained, we would get permission to sleep in some 
wayside barn, where we put up the horses for the 
night. 

On one trip there were in the party four other 
teams besides ours. It came on a very rainy night, 
and a blacksmith gave us the privilege of sleep- 
ing in his shop. In the evening, when we were 
gathered around the fire on his forge, the old 
blacksmith brought out a big jug of apple-jack, 
which is a very strong and very popular liquor 
among the farmers on the frontier. They all 
drank except my father and myself, and one of 
the men drank several times, and finally became 
very silly, and said such foolish things that it 
. made a great impression on my mind. I think 
that was my first temperance lesson. 

In going from our farm to Portland we crossed 
two quite large rivers, — the Willamette and the 
Santiam. There were no bridges across these 
streams then, and as they were too swift and 
too deep to ford, we were compelled to cross 
them on ferry-boats. These ferries were just big 
fiat scows, usually large enough to take on two 
wagons with a span of horses attached to each. 
A big rope was tied to a tree on either side of the 
river, and the ferry was attached to this rope by 
a pulley, a, little wheel running along on the big 



“ There was an Enormous Kattle-snake.” Page 91. 



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TENT AND CAMP 


93 


rope. The swift current was used to work us 
across. The ferryman had a long pole with which 
he pushed the boat off from the bank into the 
stream, and when the boat struck the current, 
the little wheel would run along the rope very fast 
and we would make good time, but when we 
passed out of the current toward the other shore, 
the ferryman would push with his pole against 
the bottom, and that was slow going. 

My father had a very large orchard, and every 
summer he would hire a number of farmers with 
their teams, and take sometimes as many as a 
dozen loads of apples at a time out to the gold 
mines in Southern Oregon, and Northern Califor- 
nia. These trips would be to points from two to 
three hundred miles distant from home. They 
loaded each wagon with as heavy a load of fruit 
as the teams could easily haul on a good road, 
and then when they came to the long hills in the 
mountains, they would have to double up, and 
sometimes put on three teams to a single wagon. 
I shall never forget my first experience on one of 
these trips. The entire journey was a series of 
sights and adventures, far more interesting and 
wonderful to me then than a trip to Rome and 
Venice was twenty-five years later. The scenes 
in the mines were very strange. It seemed so 
odd to see such a number of men camped about 


94 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


and at work, without seeing a woman or child. 
Into one of these large camps we were the first 
wagon train of fruit that year, and the miners 
were so tired of living on salt meat and flapjacks, 
without any vegetables or fruit, that when we 
opened our apples and pears they gathered about 
the wagons almost wild with excitement. They 
had been picked just as they began to ripen, and 
carefully packed in the soft meadow grass, and 
when the top covering was removed, the fra- 
grance was delicious. The miners did not have 
any money, but they had plenty of gold dust. 
My father had a pair of gold scales, and a miner 
would bring a big handkerchief or a flour sack to 
hold his apples, and would hand over his little 
leather pouch of gold dust, and father would 
weigh out the price in the scales. The prices 
seem fabulous nowadays, especially here in the 
East where so many apples sometimes go to waste 
for lack of a market. The load in my father’s 
wagon was all of the Gloria Mundi apples. They 
were large and nice, and the entire wagon load 
went off like hot cakes at “two bits,’’ or twenty- 
five cents, apiece, and I think he could have got- 
ten twice as much for them for the asking. A 
load of Bartlett pears sold at a dollar a dozen. 
One evening, as we were coming back to camp, 
we met a man with a load of watermelons. He 


TENT AND CAMP 


95 


lived about fifty miles away, down in the Rogue 
River Valley, and had brought these melons from 
his own farm. Father traded him a dozen apples 
for two watermelons. We ate one of them, and 
sold the other one for two dollars and a half. 

The miners were most of them a very rough 
sort of men, and drinking and gambling were on 
every side. Every night we heard the sound of 
pistol shots coming from some of the saloons, but 
they were very kind to me. It seemed strange to 
me then that these big, rough, bearded men should 
take so much interest in a little boy, but I was the 
only child in the camp ; and it is pathetic as I look 
back at it, for I know now that those men were 
lonely and homesick and were thinking about little 
boys and girls in their far-away homes. 


XII 


NUGGETS OF GOLD 

No one will ever see again, in this country, such 
mining camps as those of Southern Oregon and 
Northern California in my boyhood. Mining in 
those early days was a very different thing from 
what it is now. In those pioneer and democratic 
times, there were no big mining companies, or con- 
solidated trusts, employing great gangs of men to 
work for them. 

As the winter began to give way, and the snow 
to melt out of the foot-hills, a miner who had been 
wintering in the town, and had managed to waste 
or use up all his money, began to think about a 
prospecting tour, to try his luck in the gold dig- 
gings. His first step was to look up a “pard,” 
who was often a man as bankrupt in pocket as 
himself. Under the peculiar customs of the time, 
these two penniless men could go to any of the 
stores and purchase all they needed for their pro- 
specting trip, on credit, the storekeeper taking his 
risk as to their being shot by the Indians, or fail- 
96 


NUGGETS OF GOLD 


97 


ing to strike gold, or running away to some other 
town and never paying up. To the honor of 
human nature it ought to be said that if these 
men lived through to the next winter they usually 
squared their accounts. 

The mining outfit that these prospectors carried 
was very simple. Each had a long-handled shovel 
over his shoulder, and attached to the shovel end 
was a pick, a shirt, and as much flour and bacon 
as he could carry. They went up into the moun- 
tains, dug for “ pockets ” by some mountain stream, 
and washed out the dirt and rock in a rude “rocker” 
which very much resembled the old-fashioned baby 
cradle, treasuring up the fine dust and nuggets of 
gold as best they could with their rude apparatus. 

In that sort of mining “luck” was a kind of 
fabled deity, for science or past conditions seemed 
to have little to do with a man’s success. Because 
a man was “strapped,” that is, without money, 
was no possible disgrace to him. He did not feel 
bad about it, and his neighbors did not look down 
on him. To-morrow his pick might turn up a rich 
“ find ” and he be the richest man in the gulch. I 
remember the story of a Frenchman who had been 
out of luck for a long time, and had to depend on 
the generosity of others to keep from starving, 
whose pick uncovered a nugget of gold worth five 
thousand dollars. Like a great many other people, 

H 


98 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


he could stand adversity better than prosperity. 
He clutched the big nugget in his arms with a 
shriek of delight, and became a raving maniac. 
He was taken to the asylum at Stockton, Cal., but 
never recovered. 

One of the boys from our county, a great, over- 
grown, green sort of fellow, but who looked 
“greener” than he really was, went out to the 
mines to make his fortune. He went into a big 
camp and began to look about to locate a claim. 
He had with him five hundred dollars, which was 
all the money he had in the world. A couple of 
dishonest fellows who had been working at a claim 
for some time and discovered no sign of gold, 
“salted” a little pocket — that is they put a few 
small nuggets worth ten or twenty dollars, perhaps, 
in some dirt, which they washed out before his 
greedy eyes — and he gladly gave them all the money 
he had for the claim. He bought it in the forenoon, 
and as the news spread about among the miners, 
there was a great deal of indignation at the mean 
trick played on the young fellow, and some of the 
old miners quietly determined to compel the scoun- 
drels to give him his money back that evening. 
But the young greenhorn, entirely oblivious to the 
fact that he had been cheated, began to dig away 
merrily in his new-bought mine, and in less than 
two hours dug up a nugget of gold worth twelve 


NUGGETS OF GOLD 


99 


hundred dollars. That night he sold his claim for 
twenty thousand dollars, and, green as he was, he 
had sense enough to take the back track for home 
the next day, where he bought the finest farm in 
the community, got married, settled down, and, 
as the story books say, lived happy forever after- 
wards.” 

Perhaps it is not uninteresting to say that the 
two men who bought the claim dug away at it for 
a month, and then abandoned it, not having taken 
out enough to pay expenses, which illustrates what 
a lottery the old placer mining was. 

An old forty-niner told me that he and his part- 
ner once went into a gulch where very rich discov- 
eries had been made. They staked out a claim 
and built them a cabin alongside of it. They 
worked away with a will, digging down twenty 
feet, the one digging while the other hoisted the 
dirt with a windlass. When they got down to 
bedrock they prospected the dirt all around but 
could get only the color of gold. They continued 
digging farther down the flat, but with poor suc- 
cess, while fortunes were being taken out of the 
adjacent claims. They finally gave up in despair, 
his partner going away to other diggings, while 
my friend went down below the camp and took a 
claim on a little sand-bar in the middle of the creek, 
and by putting in a waterwheel he set to work in 


TOO 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


the bed of the stream and made it pay fairly well. 
While he was working along in this moderate way, 
some newcomers came to him and asked him if he 
had given up the old claim up on the flat where 
his cabin was. He replied that he had, that he 
could And nothing there, and as he had abandoned 
it they were at liberty to go in and try. They set 
to work, and digging through the stratum which he 
and his partner had ignorantly taken for bedrock, 
after going down about fifteen inches, they struck 
through into a layer of quartz pebbles and gravel, 
six feet in thickness, and so rich in gold that in less 
than two months’ time they took over sixty thou- 
sand dollars out of the claim. 

This same old Argonaut told me the story of a 
young fellow who came out to the mines from the 
East, having left his sweetheart, who had prom- 
ised to wait for him until he made his fortune and 
came home to claim her as his bride. The poor 
fellow was terribly homesick, and was very anxious 
to get gold enough to go back home. One day 
everybody within the sound of his voice was startled 
to see him jump suddenly out of a hole about eight 
feet deep, where he had been digging, and throw- 
ing his hands high in the air he shouted, “ I’m 
married, boys; I’m married!” They gathered 
around him excitedly, and made him stop shouting 
and explain. He told them about the girl who 


NUGGETS OF GOLD lOI 

was waiting, and pointing over into the hole he 
showed a yellow crust of gold at the bottom, about 
twelve inches in length by four or five inches wide. 
Poor fellow ! He was doomed to realize the truth 
of the proverb, “There is many a slip between the 
cup and the lip,” for his wonderful find proved to 
be only -a thin film but little thicker than gold leaf, 
lying on a flat rock. I hope he lived to make his 
fortune and go home to his sweetheart. 

One of the funny things, to me, on our visits to 
the mines, was the rude way in which the men did 
their cooking and patched their own clothes. Of 
course cloth was very scarce up in those camps, 
where everything had to be taken by wagon or on 
the back of a pack-mule. The flour was taken 
in sacks, and nearly all the flour was self-rising, 
or mixed with yeast powders so as to need no 
other preparation than mixing up with water to 
be all ready for baking. Because of the scarcity 
of cloth these sacks were all saved with great care, 
and were used by the miners for patching their 
pantaloons. It looked very amusing to see the 
words “ Self-Rising ” across the broad seat of a 
big burly miner’s trousers. Many of the small 
camps were deserted in the winter because of the 
impossibility of getting food, but in the larger 
camps food was brought in by wagons or mule- 
trains. If these were disturbed by the Indians, or 


102 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


overtaken by heavy snowstorms, food often became 
very scarce and naturally very expensive. 

I remember the story of one of our old neigh- 
bors, who never tired of telling the experiences of 
those winters. It was a large camp, with many 
hundreds of miners, who were shut in by enor- 
mous snowdrifts, from six to thirty feet deep. 
First the flour gave out in all the stores, and then 
all the beans, and finally there was nothing left 
but barley, which was on hand for the mules ; but 
as the mules had long since been eaten up, the 
miners fell back on the barley. They ground it 
in coffee-mills, and sifted it clean of the coarsest 
pieces of chaff by shaking it in a pan with holes 
punched in the bottom. They made it into cakes 
or loaves. At last the barley gave out, and it 
seemed that the whole camp would be starved to 
death. At length, when they were almost hope- 
less, a packer came in through the snow with the 
news that he had succeeded in getting his pack- 
train within four miles of the camp out on the 
mountains. A mass meeting was held, and it was 
determined that everybody that was able to walk 
should start out and help break a trail through 
the snow. Many of them were very weak, but as 
it was a question of life or death, the whole camp 
turned out, and after a hard struggle they suc- 
ceeded in reaching the pack-train. When they 


NUGGETS OF GOLD 


103 


reached the train the scene was one that no per- 
son who has always lived where food was plenty 
could possibly picture to himself. The men were 
almost wild with hunger and excitement. The 
whole load was bought right there on the moun- 
tain, each one securing at least a fifty-pound sack 
of flour, paying a dollar a pound for his load, and 
carrying it home on his own shoulders. Yet the 
owner of the pack-train made little, if anything, 
as nearly all of his mules died before he could 
get them out of the mountains. 

One interesting feature of the provision trade 
in these winter camps would be that flour, bacon, 
sugar, coffee, rice, beans, and tobacco would some- 
times all be the same price, — a dollar a pound. 

Mining to-day is a very different thing in those 
Northwestern mountains from what it was in the 
old times. Now great hydraulic engines furnish 
the power, and streams of water are forced against 
the mountain sides, tearing them asunder in a way 
only dreamed of in the legends of the Titans. 
Mammoth quartz mills with their ponderous crush- 
ers and shaking tables run day and night where 
once was only silence. The patient mules and 
still more patient oxen, with their canvas-roofed 
“ prairie schooners,” have vanished before the 
breath of a steed who is never weary, or lazy, or 
old, and finds his food in the black diamonds ” 


104 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


which are stored up in the hills he climbs, or in 
the mountains he tunnels. The old was the more 
romantic, but the new is more in harmony with 
this nervous, restless, inventive age. 


XIII 


MOUNTAIN CLIMBING 

About twenty-five miles from where I was born, 
and about a hundred miles south of Portland, stand- 
ing like a watch-tower on the long, green wall that 
shelters the Willamette Valley from the foggy em- 
brace of the Pacific Ocean, is Mary’s Peak, or by 
some called June Peak, the summit of the Coast 
Range Mountains in Oregon. The average height 
of the range, some four thousand feet, is lifted 
here to an elevation of nearly seven thousand feet 
above the sea. Some have been inclined to name 
the mountain from the month during the last days 
of which the snow usually disappears from its 
summit, yet in backward summers the bald crown 
of this ancient sentinel has looked northward over 
a white shirt front as late as the middle of July. 

I made two very happy pilgrimages to the top 
of this mountain in my boyhood. One of them 
was made during the first days of July, in a spell 
of terribly hot weather for that climate. Accom- 
panied by a young friend I found myself one morn- 

105 


io6 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


ing in a two-horse wagon with a full camp outfit, 
driving in a cloud of dust out of the quiet railroad 
terminus at Corvallis, with face toward the Feak. 
The day was exceedingly sultry in the valley. The 
thermometer, hanging in the shade of the post- 
office in the little college town of Philomath, where 
we ate our luncheon, registered ninety-eight degrees, 
which is an extreme heat for Oregon. But a few 
miles farther on we began to climb the hills, and 
in the shade of the great green firs, fragrant with 
balsam, found a cooler atmosphere. The farms were 
now farther apart, the road rougher; then the farms 
were little log-cabins with tiny potato patches ad- 
joining, and by five o’clock our road ended in a 
squirrel path, which did not, like Emerson’s, “run 
up a tree,” but up a mountain. 

The road ended at the cabin of an old Missourian 
who had been used to the backwoods all his life, 
and had always kept ahead of the railroads. He 
had a family of sixteen big strapping boys and 
girls, and they made a crowd of about the finest 
specimens of physical manhood and womanhood 
I have ever seen. The old man and five of the 
grown-up boys were 'none of them under six feet 
two inches high, and the old woman and some of 
the girls were nearly as large. They made their 
living largely by hunting and fishing. The old 
woman struck me as one of the oddest characters 


MOUNTAIN CLIMBING 


107 


I ever met. She had very fierce black eyes, 
and though she must have been over sixty years 
old, they were as untamed and sparkling as in her 
youth. She said of all wild game she liked panther 
the best, and that the family had been feasting on 
panther steaks that day. As I looked in the glit- 
tering eyes of that old Amazon, my sympathies 
were with the panther. 

We left the wagon with this panther-eating 
family, packed tents and blankets, guns and pro- 
visions on our horses, and, each leading one, took 
the trail for the foot of the Peak, where we were 
to camp for the night. Just at sunset we reached 
our camping-ground beside a beautiful stream that 
had its birth somewhere up on the side of the 
mountain, perhaps gushing full-born from a great 
spring, and came dancing' and splashing over its 
bed of rocky bowlders. I told my friend that if 
he would set up the camp and make a fire, I would 
risk getting trout enough from that brook for sup- 
per. He agreed to this, and I at once set out on 
my delightful quest. The long, crooked vining- 
maple twined so closely about the stream that only 
a little hazel switch, perhaps eight feet in length, 
could be used for a rod. This, with a fragment of 
silk line with a small brown hackle dangling from 
the end, entirely innocent of bait, completed the 
preparations. Slipping quietly down to the brook 


o8 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


side, I came up behind a great moss-covered rock, 
and dropped the fly on the face of the little pool 
below. Scarcely had it touched the water when, 
with a sudden rush from under the rock, a half- 
pound trout seized it, and bent my frail rod almost 
double with his brave attempts to carry off his 
prize. My friend did not yet have the coffee- 
water boiling when I returned with a string of 
fourteen speckled beauties, from a quarter to half 
a pound in weight, that would have made any 
fisherman’s mouth water. We had shot several 
young grouse on our way through the foot-hills in 
the afternoon, and it is needless to say that with 
fried trout, broiled grouse, and the cool mountain 
air for an appetizer, we feasted like kings. 

Tired from the day’s hard exertions, we spread 
our blankets early under the wide-reaching branches 
of a giant cedar, and went to sleep with the night- 
hawk’s “boom” ringing in our ears. Just as the 
daylight was creeping modestly over the forests, I 
awoke to enjoy the grandest concert I ever heard. 
Never this side of heaven do I expect to listen 
to sweeter minstrelsy than in that July dawn 
under the shadow of June Peak. The unusual 
heat had driven most of the birds out of the val- 
ley, and it seemed as if all the sweet singers of 
the Oregon forests had gathered in that mountain 
canon. What an orchestra they did make ! Every- 


MOUNTAIN CLIMBING 


109 


thing that could chirp, or warble, or pipe, or whistle, 
or trill, or trumpet, or screech, or scream, was doing 
his very best. They were all going at once, every 
feathered musician seeming to be bent on making 
all the noise possible, yet the great diversity of 
sounds blended into a sonata such as Beethoven 
never dreamed of, not even in the moonlight. 

We were up with the sunshine, and after a 
hearty breakfast started leisurely up the mountain 
trail. The bridle path led up a long ridge, and 
except at distant intervals was not uncomfortably 
steep for slow walking. It was a lovely morning, 
and the absolute silence, so far as any human 
noise was concerned, was wonderfully restful. 
Since then I have done some mountain climbing 
in a modest way in Switzerland, the pleasure- 
ground of the world, but have never found there 
that perfect isolation from human beings, that 
delicious sense of solitude, which I used to know 
in mountain excursions in Oregon. In the Alps 
you will be lost for a little while from human 
habitations, and feel that there is a little respite 
from civilization, when suddenly a Swiss boy or 
woman will pounce upon you with goat’s milk or 
sausages to sell, and your fond illusion of solitude 
vanishes. In the great Northwest it is yet possi- 
ble to find primeval nature. The last mile of our 
climb, made just before noon, was hard work, the 


no AN OREGON BOYHOOD 

trail winding back and forth against the face of 
an almost perpendicular bluff. After many a 
pause to rest, we were glad to drop, panting, 
thirsty, and exhausted, on the outer edge of the 
green-crowned summit. 

The summit of the peak is a great plateau of 
perhaps five hundred acres of as beautiful natural 
meadow. as human eye ever gazed upon. The 
grass was a most luxuriant green and struck us 
above the knee. Some years previous, an adventu- 
rous ranchman had undertaken to turn this meadow 
into profitable account by bringing here his milch 
cows for three or four months in the summer and 
making cheese. He tried it for a year or two, 
but it was such hard work getting the cows up 
the mountain and down again, and so much 
trouble to carry the cheese to market, that he 
gave it up as a bad job. He had built quite 
extensive log-cabins for the use of his dairy. 
They had now fallen into a mass of logs through 
lack of care, and had no doubt been unroofed by 
the terrific storms that beat about the devoted 
head of the old mountain in the winter time. 

My friend and myself agreed to take our sight- 
seeing later, and so wended our way over this 
lofty prairie to where a great spring of ice-cold 
water bubbled up at the head of a little canon. 
Here we made camp. We tethered our horses 


MOUNTAIN CLIMBING 


III 


on the meadow, fearing they might get homesick 
and leave us in the night. After eating our lunch, 
we took our strong field-glasses and ascended the 
highest point of the peak to enjoy the fruits of 
our labors. Facing the east, the entire Willamette 
Valley, stretching from the Calapooia Mountains 
on the south to the Columbia River on the north, 
was spread out before us like a map. This great 
champaign of mingled hill and dale and broad 
expanse of plain is from twenty to fifty miles 
wide and a hundred and fifty miles in length. 
Looking down from June Peak on this clear July 
day, farmhouses, churches, and towns all stood 
out in bold relief, and by the aid of a good glass 
were clearly discerned fifty miles away. The 
farming section looked something like a great 
irregular chessboard, with squares of black and 
gold. The broad fields of yellow harvest were 
side by side with others summer fallowed for 
autumn sowing. Down through the centre of this 
valley, winding leisurely, is the river from which 
the whole section draws its name. Its course is 
plainly marked by the long, dark lines of fir trees 
that adorn its banks. A native poet sings of the 
Willamette : 


Grace forever haunts thy journey, 
Beauty dimples on thy tide, 


II2 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


Time that mars us, 

Maims and scars us, 

Leaves no track or trench on thee.” 

Down from the mountains trail narrower lines 
of green, that tell of smaller streams that are 
born amid the hills, and go plunging over the 
rocks white with froth until they reach the valley, 
and then jog along very lazily through the quiet 
meadows until they join the Willamette. 

Skirting the horizon from Puget Sound on the 
north to far-away Southern Oregon southward, is 
the great range which makes the far-famed Sierras 
of California and the Cascades of Oregon. The 
Cascades were long the paradise of the hunter, but 
the old romantic hunter of Fenimore Cooper’s 
time who used to rejoice in those mountains has 
disappeared. 

His footprints have failed us 
Where berries were red 

And madronas are rankest. 

The hunter is dead ! 

The grizzly may pass 
By his half-open door ; 

May pass and repass 
On his path as of yore ; 

“ The panther may crouch 
In the leaves of his limb ; 

May scream and may scream. 

It is nothing to him. 


MOUNTAIN CLIMBING 


II3 


Prone, bearded, and breasted, 
Like columns of stone ; 

And tall as a pine — 

As a pine overthrown! 

“ His camp-fires gone. 

What else can be done 
Than let him sleep on 
Till the light of the sun? 

“ Ay, tombless! what of it? 
Marble is dust, 

Cold and repellent ; 

And iron is rust.” 

So sings Joaquin Miller, and so it is. 


1 


XIV 


ON THE MOUNTAIN TOP 

From our standpoint of vision on the summit 
of June Peak, the Cascade Range is studded with 
great mountains clad in eternal snows. The long 
reach of vision begins with Rainier, two hundred 
miles and more northward. For a hundred miles 
about its base, the smoke and haze of the summer 
afternoon hid everything from our vision, but up 
above the smoke and the haze the great marble 
dome of Rainier stood out sharp and clear before 
our gaze. Standing as it does at the inner gate- 
way of Puget Sound, nearly fifteen thousand feet 
in height, a hundred miles in girth about its snow- 
line, feeding six splendid rivers from as many 
glaciers, — feeding them so generously that they 
leap almost full-born from their icy home, — 
Rainier is a sentinel of which the dwellers of that 
“ Western Mediterranean ” may well be proud. 

From Rainier, following the line southward, the 
eye rests on St. Helen’s and Adams, and then on 
gray old Mount Hood, — the only rival that dares 

1 14 


ON THE MOUNTAIN TOP II5 

contend with Rainier. There is a legend among 
the Indians that these two great mountains used 
to “spit fire at each other.” Though the grim 
old warriors have long since ceased to fight, their 
jealous friends continue the controversy. 

My friend, Dr. Harvey K. Hines, made the 
ascent of Mount Hood when I was a boy nine 
years of age, after two unsuccessful attempts. On 
the first ascent, with three companions, he suc- 
ceeded in getting within a thousand feet of the 
summit, when they were suddenly overtaken by 
a dense cloud that came sweeping against the 
north side of the mountain and drifted rapidly 
over it, instantly enveloping them in its folds. 

The air, from being warm and mild, changed 
suddenly to fierce cold; the winds. howled around 
the sides of the mountain, and shrieked away in 
doleful cadences below. The driving snow filled 
the air so entirely that a cliff of rocks three hun- 
dred feet from them was entirely invisible. To 
go up or to go down was for the time alike im- 
possible. They could only crouch against the for- 
bidding breast of the mountain and brave the 
beating of the storm. Frost and ice gathered in 
their hair and beards and clothes till they looked 
like four ice kings shaking winter from their 
grizzly locks. The snow was swept by fierce 
winds in waves and drifts in every direction. It 


Il6 AN OREGON BOYHOOD 

was only by almost superhuman endurance that 
they escaped from the mountain alive. Dr. Hines 
again ascended the great mountain, and succeeded 
in reaching the summit, and descended into the 
crater, where he found the air hot and stifling and 
great quantities of volcanic rock and ashes. Dr. 
George C. Wilding, of Jersey City, made the as- 
cent of this Oregon giant, also, a few years since. 

But Mount Hood looks peaceful enough to us, 
looking out on it from June Peak. We let our 
eyes follow down the great wall again. There is 
Jefferson, and then, standing together in queenly 
majesty, — not quite so lofty as their brothers, 
but more graceful, as becomes their sex, — are 
the Three Sisters, which are almost opposite 
where we stand, and perhaps eighty miles away 
as the crow flies, though they look near enough, 
when viewed through the powerful lens, to drop 
in on for an evening call before sundown. We 
look away on toward the south, and it seems like 
a vast, empty place. There used to be another 
in this exalted family, occupying much the same 
position on the so'uth that Rainier does on the 
north. To-day it is known as Crater Lake, which 
is one of nature’s marvels. Imagine a lake situ- 
ated on a mountain that is yet seven thousand 
feet above the sea, surrounded by walls from one 
to two thousand feet in height. The water has 



“The Driving Snow Filled the Air.” Pa(je 115. 








I" 


e 





4ft. 

i-' 


t 


{ 

Mi V . 





ON THE MOUNTAIN TOP 


II7 


been found by the government survey to be more 
than two thousand feet in depth, and is the deep- 
est body of fresh water on the globe. In its cen- 
tre the summit of the ancient mountain still stands. 
It is now called Wizard Island, and contains the 
last smoking chimney of the once mighty volcano. 
The island is six hundred feet high, and the 
centre crater — called the Witches’ Caldron — is 
ninety feet deep and four hundred and seventy- 
five feet in diameter. In the old times — a few 
thousand years ago — it must have been a mag- 
nificent mountain. In the days before the hot 
breath of the volcano soiled its snow-white head, 
it was no doubt the most towering of all the giant 
domes of that great line of mountains. It sniffed 
the air far above the reach of Rainier, or Hood, 
or Shasta. But its great heart was on fire, and 
after a while it could no longer suppress the burn- 
ing hell in its bosom. Great streams of flame 
poured forth from its summit, and wide-reaching 
waves of lava rolled down the mountain side for 
forty miles and more away, as can be easily traced 
to this day, though these lava ridges have long 
since become fertile, and forests of mammoth 
trees grow and wave above them now. At last 
the foundations of the great mountain gave way, 
, and its proud head — that had battled with the 
storms and gathered the treasures of the snow 


Il8 AN OREGON BOYHOOD 

through ten thousand winters — sank forever out 
of sight. Down, down, down, deep into the 
empty heart of the earth it sank, leaving a great 
yawning blackened chasm which succeeding gen- 
erations of snow and rain have filled with pure, 
fresh water, giving to us in our time one of the 
most beautiful lakes ever revealed to the eye of 
man. 

There is probably no point of interest on the 
American continent that more completely over- 
comes the ordinary Indian with fear than Crater 
Lake. From the time when the memory of the 
white man runneth not to the contrary, no power 
has been strong enough to induce an Indian to 
approach within sight of it. It is easy enough, 
for a small sum, to hire them to guide you until 
you come near the summit, but just before reach- 
ing the top, your dusky guide will leave you to 
proceed alone. To the savage mind, this unique 
lake is clothed with a deep veil of mystery, and 
is, in his opinion, the abode of all manner of 
demons and unshapely monsters. The Klamath 
Indians, who live near it, believe that while once 
it was inhabited by the Great Spirit, it is now 
the home of demons, and that it would be certain 
death for an Indian to behold it. 

These Klamath Indians say that a long time 
ago, long before the white man appeared in the 


ON THE MOUNTAIN TOP 1 19 

region to vex and drive the natives out, a band 
of Klamaths, while out hunting, came suddenly 
upon the lake, and were startled by its remarkable 
walls and awed by its majestic proportions. With 
spirits subdued and trembling with fear, they 
silently approached and gazed upon its face. 
Something within told them that the Great Spirit 
dwelt there and they dared not remain, but passed 
silently down the side of the mountain and camped 
far away. There was, however, in that company 
a young chief of a peculiarly courageous and dar- 
ing temperament, and he determined within his 
own mind to know more of that strange lake. 
After all the rest were asleep, he returned to the 
summit of the mountain to gaze upon its waters. 
He went up to the very brink of the precipice and 
started his camp-fire. Here he lay* down to rest, 
here he slept till morn, slept till the sun was high 
in the heavens, then arose and joined the tribe far 
down the mountain. At night he came again, and 
again he slept till morn. Each visit bore a charm 
that drew him back again. Each night found him 
sleeping above the rocks ; and each night strange 
voices arose from the waters and mysterious noises 
filled the air. At last, after a great many moons, 
he grew courageous by familiarity, and climbed 
down to the lake, and there he bathed and spent 
the night. Afterwards he often climbed down in 


120 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


the same manner and frequently saw wonderful ani- 
mals similar in all respects to a Klamath Indian ex- 
cept that they seemed to exist entirely in the water. 
Bathing in these strange waters had a remarkable 
effect upon this brave young chief. He suddenly 
became hardier and stronger than any Indian of 
the tribe. At first he kept his own counsel, and no 
one knew what strange thing had come over him. 
But at last, in an unwary moment, he told his 
squaw the secret in confidence and somehow or 
other it got out. After that others began to seek 
its influence. Old warriors sent their sons for 
strength and courage to meet the conflicts awaiting 
them. In an evil hour the chief who first visited 
the lake killed one of the strange monsters that 
inhabited it, and was at once set upon by untold 
numbers of Llaos (for such they were called), who 
carried him to the top of the cliff, cut his throat 
with a stone knife, then tore his body into small 
pieces, which were thrown down to the waters far 
beneath, where he was devoured by angry Llaos, 
— and such shall be the fate of every Klamath 
Indian who, from that day to this, dares to look 
upon Crater Lake. 

Filled with thoughts like these we turned our 
faces to the west. We looked over a great reach 
of forest, terraced away for thirty miles and more 
in a gradually descending stairway to the sea. As 


ON THE MOUNTAIN TOP 


I2I 


far as the eye could reach, north or south, stretched 
the uneven shore-line of the mighty Pacific. Out 
across the waters in the great western recess the 
slowly retreating sun flooded the waves with molten 
gold. We stood rapt and still in this august pres- 
ence, until like a great wheel of fire it sank down 
into the dark abyss. Then with a long-drawn sigh, 
each busy with thoughts of his own, — thoughts no 
pen can express, — we turned about and walked 
silently back to camp. 


XV 


FUN AND FELLOWSHIP 

While a boy growing up on the frontier misses 
many things that to the mind of the Eastern lad, 
born into the lap of city life, are absolutely essen- 
tial in order to have a good time, he has to make 
up for it a great many other things that no city can 
furnish. There was a sense of freedom about the 
old life on the frontier, when the farms were large 
and the neighbor^ far apart, when game abounded 
and the fishing was good, that one born and 
reared in the large town or city has never 
known. 

One of my earliest joys, after I had gotten good 
use of my legs, was learning to swim. My father 
taught me to swim when I was seven years old, 
and in a little while I could swim and dive like a 
duck. I do not remember any boy with whom I 
was acquainted in my youth who was not a good 
swimmer. It was taken as a matter of course. 
A boy learned to swim in due time, just as he 
learned to walk and talk, and afterwards to fish 
and shoot and ride horseback. 


122 


FUN AND FELLOWSHIP 


123 


There is perhaps no greater compensation for 
being a country boy, and especially being a pio- 
neer country boy, than his friendship with horses, 
and his almost unlimited opportunity for horse- 
back riding. I cannot recall when I began rid- 
ing on horseback. As far back as my memory 
goes it is mixed up with sitting on the bare back 
of a horse, holding to the mane. Nearly every 
boy that was at all plucky grew to be expert in 
the art of what was called “ breaking ” horses, and 
thought nothing of catching up an utterly wild 
horse out of the band, cinching the big western cow- 
boy saddle on him, and mounting him just for the 
excitement of the thing. I have ridden and really 
enjoyed it, as most agreeable sport, with Indian 
cayuses that would “buck” the first half-hour I 
mounted, no matter if it were three or four times 
a day. 

In addition to hunting and fishing, the win- 
ter time in pioneer sections gives to the rugged 
boy accustomed to outdoor sports a great many 
pleasures, such as trapping for birds and wild 
animals. My trapping experiences began with 
snowbirds and jaybirds and meadow-larks when I 
was barely big enough to pull the string fastened 
to the trigger under the trap set in the dooryard, 
I watching through the window till the bird was 
in place to be captured under my open trap made of 


124 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


split sticks. Later, I managed to get a great deal 
of enjoyment out of trapping quail in the same 
way, except that the trap was larger and was set 
with figure-four triggers so that the birds would 
throw it themselves. How a boy’s heart will get 
in his throat, when in making the rounds of his 
traps on a winter morning he comes upon one 
with ten or a dozen beautiful California quail in 
it! 

A trapping instinct was fed in us by the pres- 
ence yet in the community of a few wandering 
belated trappers who had spent their lifetime 
working for the old fur companies, and who now 
lived a sort of hermit life in their little log huts 
back in the edge of the mountains. These men 
wore moccasins like the Indians, and some of 
them continued till the day of their death to wear 
no other clothes save the picturesque buckskin 
suits quaintly ornamented by some Indian squaw, 
the whole set off by a coonskin cap with a coon’s 
tail dangling down the back of the neck. These 
men eked out a livelihood by trapping for beaver 
and mink and otter in the winter, which sufficed, 
with their deerskins, to procure what they needed 
for their simple wants. Besides the ammunition 
for their rifles, a little flour and tobacco and with 
some of them a jug of whiskey were all they 
required. They were odd specimens of human- 


FUN AND FELLOWSHIP 


125 


ity, — a leaf out of the still more romantic past, — 
and were full of stories of Indian fighting, buffalo 
hunting, and wild exploits with grizzly bears, and 
all those things which make the delicious shivers 
run up and down a boy’s backbone and cause his 
hair to stand on end. For days after one of these 
trappers would visit our home — as they often did 
to spend the night, for father was a great talker 
and the soul of hospitality, and mother’s cooking 
was held in high renown — I would be planning 
trapping expeditions, and every jaybird I caught 
was magnified into an eagle, and any wandering 
polecat that got in my steel trap my excited 
imagination idealized into a grizzly bear. In 
those days I built many castles in the air, and 
enjoyed indescribable day-dreams picturing how, 
when I was old enough, I would forsake civiliza- 
tion and, seeking the deeper fastnesses of the 
wilder Northwest, become a second Joe Meek or 
Kit Carson. 

There was in many ways a very beautiful though 
unconscious communism in the neighborhood life 
of that frontier existence. If one farmer had a 
killing, whether it was a beef steer, or mutton, or 
hogs, he never thought of storing it all away in 
his own smoke house, but without at all consider- 
ing it a matter of generosity he cut it up and sent 
large portions to all the neighbors within reach. 


126 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


While of course it was expected that the neighbors 
would treat him in the same way when occasion 
offered, it was never charged up as so many 
pQunds of meat, or any account kept of it as a 
debt; but was sent just as freely to those whom 
the farmer had every reason to beUeve would not 
be able to make return. If a house or a barn was 
to be raised, it was a matter of interest to the 
community for many miles around. 

I well remember an occasion when there was a 
barn-raising at my father’s farm. Not only the 
men and the big boys came, but the women and 
the little folks, and it was a great holiday for 
everybody. Father had been for a long time 
getting the logs ready, — cutting them the right 
lengths, hewing them off on each side, and cutting 
notches in close to each end, so that they would fit 
into each other. Then he hauled them out of 
the forest to the place where the barn was to be 
built. All the neighbors around were invited to 
come on a certain day, and they came very early 
in the morning. I can see them now, coming with 
big wagon loads of boys and girls and little chil- 
dren, everybody whistling and singing and shout- 
ing jests to one another as they came. The 
women went to work with a will to help make the 
chicken pies and all the other good things that 
we youngsters thought were the best part of the 


FUN AND FELLOWSHIP 


127 


barn-raising. The men got to work in good ear- 
nest, lifting the big hewed logs into their places. 
One of the older men, who was a sort of a car- 
penter in his way and a recognized leader in the 
community, was selected as superintendent of the 
barn-raising, and everything was done as he said. 
When the walls got up pretty high it was all they 
could do to lift the logs, and when they were 
ready to lift they would all cheer and shout 
“ Hee-o-hee-e ! ” Before the night came the big 
barn stood there on the hill where the pile of 
logs had been in the morning. 

This neighborly feeling always came out in 
marked beauty if a farmer was sick. I remember 
occasions when a neighbor would ride around 
the community and tell the story of some farmer 
who was too ill to get his spring crops in, and set 
a day when the neighbors were to gather at the 
farm, and do the sick man’s planting for him. 
This was often kept a secret from the family 
themselves, and was to them a very blessed sort 
of surprise party; for when the day came, about 
daylight, their whole field would be alive with 
horses and men and big boys, a dozen or more 
ploughs would be turning over the black soil, and 
pretty soon somebody would set to sowing wheat, 
or oats, and the boys to harrowing, or may be 
driving a span of horses hitched to a big pile of 


128 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


green branches that brushed the wheat in, and 
so by night the field that looked so neglected 
the day before was all well started for a new 
crop. 

Another great gathering time was at the apple- 
parings in the autumn. I have known people to 
go ten miles on horseback to spend half the night 
at an apple-paring, and go home thinking they 
had been well paid. 

Spelling schools and quilting bees were also 
great social centres in the early backwoods times. 
Some of the old men, and now and then an old 
lady, in their rude, backwoods apparel and often 
uncouth appearance, looking as though they would 
have hard work to read and write at all, would 
spell away by the hour, and were especially trained 
on all sorts of trick words. Such contests would 
sometimes get to be very exciting. 

Never a winter passed without neighborhood 
hunts, in which all the able-bodied men and boys 
in the community met early in the morning and 
chose sides, and started out for a day’s hunting, 
every kind of game being scheduled at a certain 
number of points. In the evening they met at an 
agreed place and counted points, and the side that 
had the least had to pay for the supper for all 
of them. This was usually an oyster supper, as 
oysters were scarce enough to make the promise 


FUN AND FELLOWSHIP 


129 


of an oyster supper a dream of Delmonico’s to 
a backwoods youth. 

In times of sickness nobody ever dreamed of 
hiring a nurse. If wife and mother was ill, one 
of the big girls in the neighborhood went in for 
a week to do the cooking, and then another would 
take her place if the illness was prolonged, while 
the neighboring women took turns in spending the 
night there to watch with and care for the sufferer. 
Men did the same way in sitting up with their sick 
neighbors. Weddings and funerals were attended 
by everybody that was able to go, and such a 
thing as special invitations, or selecting out special 
friends on those occasions, was never thought of 
any more at a wedding than at a funeral. Of 
course it was all very informal and unconven- 
tional, but in its brotherly kindness it came nearer 
being the ideal life than anything the modern 
socialist or communist dreams of. 

K 


XVI 


THE KNIGHT OF THE SADDLE-BAGS 

During all the days of my younger boyhood 
the man who came in from the outside and brought 
most of interest from beyond the little narrow 
world of a backwoods community was the circuit- 
rider, a veritable “ man on horseback.” Our house 
was known as the “preachers’ hotel,” and all 
preachers of every denomination known to the 
country at that time put up there whenever they 
were passing through. They had always a hearty 
welcome to the best that the place afforded, and 
it never cost anything, and that sort of a bill is 
as comfortable to a preacher as anybody else. 

The old circuit-rider lived in his saddle-bags. 
He was often away from home for weeks at a 
time, and was compelled, like Sherman’s army 
on its march to the sea, to live off the country. 
He carried his library with him. It consisted 
of his Bible and hymn-book and three or four 
books which he usually had along to sell. Nearly 
all the books we had in those days we had bought 
130 


THE KNIGHT OF THE SADDLE-BAGS I3I 

of the preachers, who brought them in their sad- 
dle-bags. 

My people belonged to the United Brethren 
Church, a branch of the larger Methodist fold, 
and having the same system of quarterly meet- 
ings. In those primitive conditions the quarterly 
meeting was made a great deal of, and usually 
brought together not only the presiding elder 
and the circuit-rider, but often a number of local 
preachers, besides lay members from twenty or 
thirty miles around. They would come to the 
place where the meeting was to be held about 
Friday, and stay over Sunday. On such occa- 
sions it was not uncommon for us to have from 
twenty-five to thirty guests at our house, and beds 
would be laid down all over the floors, and some- 
times there would be as many as three tables full 
to feed in the big dining-room, which was also the 
kitchen with its great open fireplace. 

We in turn went occasionally to the quarterly 
meeting when it was held at a distant part of the 
circuit. I remember on one occasion we went 
some twenty miles away to attend such a meeting 
held in the Mary’s River Church. This was the 
first church of our denomination I had ever seen, 
and indeed the second altogether. It was a little, 
plain, barn-like structure that would hold perhaps 
a hundred and fifty people, but I think it impressed 


132 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


my boyish imagination more than did St. Peter’s 
in Rome at a later date, after I had been thoroughly 
steeped in European cathedrals. One of the lead- 
ing members of that church at Mary’s River was 
a colored man, known as Uncle Reuben. He was 
a very well-to-do farmer and highly respected. 
We were entertained at his house. He and his 
family were the first colored people I had ever 
seen, and they made such a vivid impression on 
me that, though I was not more than five or six 
years old at the time, they each one stand out 
clearly in my memory, as though it were only yes- 
terday. The old man’s Southern vernacular was 
a constant wonder and delight to me, and his ques- 
tion to my father after the meeting, “ Say, Brud- 
dah Banks, will youah hoss tote a light ? ” has stuck 
like a burr in the gray matter of my brain through 
all the years. 

Some of those early circuit-riders were exceed- 
ingly interesting characters. One of the first of 
them that I remember was a man by the name of 
Dougherty. He was a son of the Emerald Isle, 
and as full of wit and poetry as Tom Moore. His 
big heart, overflowing in humor and cheerfulness, 
made him beloved by the children everywhere. Of 
all the people I knew in my boyhood, he was the 
most charming conversationalist. The talk never 
flagged when he was about. He was not only 


THE KNIGHT OF THE SADDLE-BAGS 


133 


brimful of stories, but his wit was so quick and 
so droll, and the vein of pathos always so ready to 
well up in him, that as a talker he was not only 
entertaining, but inspiring and helpful. I think 
I have always had a tenderer side for the Irish 
people because he was the first Irishman I ever 
knew. He was a big man, and fleshy. He greatly 
loved poetry. I think I never have known any 
one who quoted as many poems and hymns in his 
sermons as did this circuit-rider in the Oregon hills. 
Although he died before I was eight years old, I 
have no doubt that my own fondness for poetic 
illustration in public discourse owes a good deal 
in its beginning to the wonderful impression he 
made upon my childish imagination. His early 
and sudden death, while he was preaching on our 
circuit, spread universal sorrow among all the 
homes that had been gladdened by his presence. 

I remember another one of a very different 
type, although he, too, was big and fat. His name 
was Allen, and they called him “ Skookum ” Allen, 
because he was so strong. He perspired very easily, 
and so always, unless it was in the depths of winter, 
however he began, he ended his sermon in his shirt 
sleeves. If it was a warm day, he stripped for the 
race before he began ; but if cooler, as he warmed 
up his coat and vest came off in instalments. He 
used to bring down his big, maul-like fists on the 


134 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


little table with sufficient force to shake the old 
log schoolhouse with his vehemence. . He was 
not a very entertaining preacher, and had a good 
many mannerisms. I remember he had a way 
of saying frequently, “As I said before.” He 
often used this expression when he had not said 
it before, but put it in simply to fill up. On one 
irreverent day of my youth, I set myself to count 
the times he would use it during a sermon, and 
tabulated sixty-four repetitions against him. 

When a little barefooted fellow at school, I first 
read Oliver Wendell Holmes’ poem, “The Last 
Leaf,” in the school-reader, and came to the 
verse 

* “ I know it is a sin 

For me to sit and grin 
At him here ; 

But the old three-cornered hat, 

And the breeches, and all that. 

Are so queer ! ” 

My conscience applied it all to my own conduct 
in regard to “ Skookum ” Allen. 

Another interesting figure in that portrait gal- 
lery of circuit-riders was a man by the name of 
Kenoyer. He was a tall, cadaverous brother, with 
an awfully solemn mien, and was considered a 
powerful exhorter. I shall never forget my first 
memory of him. It was at Christmas time, and 
he had come home with us from preaching at the 


THE KNIGHT OF THE SADDLE-BAGS 


135 


schoolhouse for Christmas dinner. We had been 
fattening a big turkey gobbler for that happy oc- 
casion, and he was a monster. He had turned the 
scales after he was dressed at over eighteen pounds. 
It was a settled thing in the family that I, being 
the eldest son, always had the gizzard of any fowl 
that appeared on our table. I had lotted on that 
old gobbler’s gizzard every time I had seen him 
strut for the last three months, and a good many 
times that morning had looked forward with happy 
anticipation to seeing it on my plate while listening 
to a very long and, to me, dull sermon. The fashion 
at our table was to carve up the meat, and then 
pass it around, and let each guest select what he 
desired. Never a thought of danger entered my 
head as father passed the turkey to Parson Kenoyer 
as the guest of honor, and so what happened came 
as a flash of lightning out of a clear sky. The old 
man deliberately lifted his fork and set it into that 
gobbler’s gizzard, and laid it on his own plate. If 
that fork had gone into my own heart, it couldn’t 
have hurt me worse. That my father was biting 
his lips to keep from laughing, my mother peer- 
ing out of the corners of her eyes to see how I took 
it, and my sister pinching my leg under the table, 
did not help to make it a more pleasing situation. 
I could not help a big tear rolling down my cheek, 
though I gulped down my sorrow and did the best I 


136 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


could in silence ; but the charm of that Christmas 
dinner had fled. 

That was not the last lick that Kenoyer 
was to get at me. In addition to his accomplish- 
ments as a preacher, he was a quack doctor of 
considerable reputation among the country folks. 
I was afflicted for several years in my youth with 
what afterwards proved to be spasmodic attacks 
of asthma; but Kenoyer, with his grave, medical 
air, diagnosed my case in a fatal hour, and told 
my alarmed and horrified parents that I had a 
tapeworm of enormous proportions. He entered 
into such details — telling of other cases where 
he 'had taken away tapeworms long enough to 
make a lasso rope for a cow-boy — that he scared 
me nearly to death ; and I was handed over to 
him a trembling victim to be treated. And that 
blundering old saint positively did give me the 
most nauseating nostrums, and submitted me — a 
growing boy — to the most rigid diet system for 
six months, in order to develop a tapeworm out 
of my asthma. He at last gave it up in disgust, 
to my infinite relief. 

One odd case in this group that stands out in 
my memory was a man by the name of Mayfield, 
— as tall and straight and dark as a Cherokee 
Indian. He was a man of remarkable personal 
magnetism, and was regarded as a very success- 


THE KNIGHT OF THE SADDLE-BAGS 1 37 

fill revivalist. The trouble with Mayfield was that 
he would never stick where he was put. He 
would go to his circuit all right after Conference, 
and set the whole country afire with his magnetic 
personality and seemingly overflowing earnestness. 
But the first thing anybody knew, he was gather- 
ing up a band of horses to drive off to California 
or some place else on a speculation, and that 
would be the last that would be seen of him until 
about the next Conference, when he would turn 
up, make a pathetic exhortation that would melt 
the brethren to tears, and, as preachers were 
scarce, he would be forgiven and sent out again, 
to do the same thing over another year. Indeed, 
one of the greatest temptations that a travelling 
preacher had in those days was to fall before the 
fascinations of the horse-trader. A preacher had 
to have a horse, and he was usually a good judge 
of a horse, and many of them hurt their influence 
very much by getting a sort of horse-jockey repu- 
tation. 

One of the younger men of that time, and one 
of the purest and noblest, was Uncle Wallace 
Hurlburt. He had come to Oregon a boy, and 
began his ministry there on those great frontier 
circuits. He was a natural orator. He had as a 
birthright the gift of graceful, persuasive speech. 
But his greatest power was not in his eloquence 


138 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


SO much as in a genial soul, which gave him a 
personality at once so gentle and cheerful that he 
brought sunshine with him into every farmhouse 
he entered. Uncle Wallace knew how to do a 
lot of things besides preaching. He could make 
the best willow whistles of any man in the coun- 
try, and he could take the stalk of an elderberry 
tree and make a squirt-gun that would throw 
water on the roof of the house. The preacher 
who could do those things on the frontier was 
regarded there, as the modern college boy would 
put it now, as a “regular Jim-dandy of a fellow.” 
Uncle Wallace’s religion was not stilted, but seemed 
to fit him as though he was born to it. When he 
read the Bible, he did it in such a natural way 
that it seemed as if he were reading a letter, and 
when he led at family prayers, we felt that the 
Lord was not very far away. 

After all, I owe these early circuit-riders more 
than any one else after my parents. They brought 
in a little breath of the larger world, and most of 
them brought with them a flavor of new books 
and a certain love of books, which cropped out 
in their conversation and helped to give the wide- 
awake boy or girl a hope and an ambition for the 
best things. Blessings on the memory of the old 
circuit-rider and his saddle-bags ! 


XVII 


LEGEND AND BARBECUE 

During all my boyhood and early manhood, I 
saw a great deal of the Indians. Our farm was 
not far away from the Siletz Indian Reservation, 
and many of those Indians frequently came through 
the settlements with fresh salmon for sale, at the 
opening of the fishing season, or to trade off their 
moccasins and baskets. Fish-spears and all that 
sort of things they made a specialty of in traffic 
with the whites. The little babies, called pap- 
pooses, which the mothers carried on their backs, 
done up in little baskets that looked like mummy 
cases, were always a source of interest. Nearly 
every stream in the country, as well as mountain 
or waterfall or canon, had its Indian name in the 
early times, and some legend or tradition in con- 
nection with it. 

I remember many of these legends, but one of 
the most interesting of all the mythic tales among 
the Northwest Indians is one connected with the 
origin of the echo. According to the Indians, this 
139 


140 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


is how it happened. I-o-wi (the turtle dove) was 
gathering seeds in the valley, and her little babe 
slept. Wearied with carrying it on her back, she 
laid it under the Ti-ho-pi (sage bush) in care of its 
sister, 0-ho-ton (the summer yellowbird). Engaged 
in her labors, the mother wandered away to a dis- 
tance, when a Tso-a-vwits (a witch) came and said 
to the little girl, “ Is that your brother ? ” And 
O-ho-ton answered, “This is my sister,” for she 
had heard that witches preferred to steal little 
boys and did not care for girls. Then the witch 
was angry and chided her, saying that it was very 
naughty for girls to lie ; and she put on a strange 
and horrid appearance, so that poor little O-ho-ton 
was stupefied with fright ; then the witch ran away 
with the boy, carrying him to her home on a dis- 
tant mountain. Arriving there, she laid him down 
on the ground, and, taking hold of his right foot, 
stretched the baby’s leg until it was as long as that 
of a man, and she did the same to his other leg ; 
then his body was stretched out ; then his arms ; 
and, behold, the baby was as large as a man. Then 
the Tso-a-vwits married him and had a husband, 
which she had long desired. But though he had 
the body of a man he had the heart of a babe, and 
knew no better than to marry the witch. 

Now when I-o-wi came back and found not her 
babe under the sage bush, but learned of O-ho-ton 


LEGEND AND BARBECUE I4I 

that it had been stolen by a witch, she was very 
angry and punished her daughter severely. Then 
she went in search of her babe for a long time, 
mourning as she went, and crying and still crying 
and refusing to be comforted, though all her friends 
joined in the search and promised to revenge her 
wrongs. 

Chief among her friends was her brother Kwi-na 
(the eagle), who travelled far and wide, over all the 
land, until one day he heard a strange noise, and 
coming near he saw the Tso-a-vwits and U-ja (the 
sage cock) her husband ; but he did not know 
that this tall man was the little baby boy who had 
been stolen. Yet he returned and related to I-o-wi 
what he had seen, who said, “ If that is indeed my 
boy, he will know my voice.” And so the mother 
came near to where the Tso-a-vwits and U-ja were 
living, and climbed into a cedar tree, and mourned 
and cried continually. Kwi-na placed himself on 
another tree near by to observe what effect the 
voice of the mother would have on U-ja, the Tso- 
a-vwits’ husband. When he heard the cry of his 
mother, U-ja knew the voice and said to the Tso- 
a-vwits, “ I hear my mother, I hear my mother,” 
but she laughed at him and persuaded him to hide. 

Now the Tso-a-vwits had taught U-ja to hunt, 
and a short time before he had killed a mountain 
sheep, which was lying in the camp. The witch 


142 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


emptied the contents of the stomach, and with 
her husband took refuge therein; for she said 
to herself, “ Surely I-o-wi will never look in the 
stomach of a mountain sheep for my husband.” 
In this retreat they were safe for a long time, so 
that they who were searching were sorely puzzled 
at the strange disappearance. At last Kwi-na 
said, “They are hid somewhere in the ground, 
maybe, or under the rocks ; after a long time they 
will be hungry and will search for food; I will 
put some in a tree so as to tempt them.” So he 
killed a rabbit and put it on the top of a tall 
pine, from which he trimmed the branches and 
peeled the bark, so that it would be very difficult 
to climb ; and he said, “ When these hungry 
people come out and try to climb that tree for 
food, it will take much time, and while the Tso-a- 
vwits is thus engaged, we will carry U-ja away.” 

So they watched until the Tso-a-vwits was very 
hungry, and her baby-hearted husband cried for 
food ; and she came out from her hiding-place 
and sought for something to eat. The odor of 
the meat placed on the tree came to her nostrils, 
and she saw where it was, and tried to climb up, 
but fell back many times; and while so doing, 
Kwi-na, who had been sitting on a rock near by, 
and had seen from whence she came, ran to their 
hiding-place, and taking the baby-hearted man 


LEGEND AND BARBECUE 


143 


carried him away and laid him down under the 
same bush from where he had been stolen ; and 
behold ! he changed into the same beautiful little 
babe that I-o-wi had lost 

And Kwi-na went off into the sky and brought 
back a storm, and caused the wind to blow, and 
the rain beat upon the ground so that his tracks 
were covered and the Tso-a-vwits could not follow 
him. But she saw lying on the ground some 
eagle feathers and knew well who it was that 
had deprived her of her husband, and she said 
to herself, “Well, I know Kwi-na is the brother 
of I-o-wi; he is a great warrior and a terrible 
man; I will go to To-go-a (the rattlesnake), my 
grandfather, who will protect me and kill my 
enemies.” 

To-go-a was enjoying his midday sleep on a 
rock, and as the Tso-a-vwits came near, her grand- 
father awoke and called out to her, “ Go back, go 
back ; you are not wanted here ; go back ! ” But 
she knew not where to hide, and when he opened 
his mouth the Tso-a-vwits crawled into his stomach. 
This made To-go-a very sick, and he entreated her 
to crawl out ; but she refused, for she was in great 
fear. Then he tried to throw her up but could 
not, and was sick nigh unto death. At last, in his 
terrible retchings, he crawled out of his own skin, 
and left the Tso-a-vwits in it; and she, imprisoned 


144 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


there, rolled about and hid in the rocks. When 
Kwi-na came near he shouted, “Where are you, 
old Tso-a-vwits Where are you, old Tso-a- 
vwits ? ” And she repeated his words in mockery. 

Ever since that day witches have lived in snake 
skins, and hide among the rocks, and take great 
delight in repeating the words of passers-by. The 
white man, who has lost the history of these an- 
cient people, calls those mocking cries of witches 
hidden in snake skins “echoes,” but the Indians 
know the voices of the old hags. This is the 
origin of the echo. 

It is not a very big jump from the Indian 
legends to the old-fashioned, political meetings, 
which were a very interesting feature of frontier 
life. In the East it is rather a rare thing for 
candidates for public office to meet each other in 
joint debate, but in the early Oregon days that 
was universal, from the candidates for governor 
down to those for county commissioner and sheriff. 
These stump speeches abounded in humorous 
stories and sharp hits. Each candidate was 
always trying to get the laugh on his competitor. 

One of the sharpest wits brought to the front 
by that species of rough-and-tumble debate was 
J. W. Nesmith, a Yankee boy who went to Oregon 
about the time my father did, and who, having 
good natural ability, polished and sharpened his 


LEGEND AND BARBECUE 


145 


wits on the stump platform. Nesmith served 
Oregon for six years in the United States Senate, 
and notwithstanding his rude exterior, was an 
honor to himself and to the state. Among those 
who took a great fancy to him, because of his 
genial conversational gifts and ready wit, was the 
highly cultured and dignified Charles Sumner. 
Soon after he came to the Senate, a number of 
senators gathered around him one day, among 
whom were some of the most famous men of the 
war period. During the conversation, Mr. Sumner 
asked : 

“What were your impressions, Mr. Nesmith, 
when you first came to the Senate } ” 

He modestly replied that when he first took his 
seat, and looked about the Senate Chamber, re- 
membering that in that chamber Clay, Webster, 
Calhoun, Benton, and many of the greatest minds 
the nation had produced, had fought for mastery 
in the great problems of statesmanship, he could 
only pinch himself and say, “ Nesmith, how in 
the world did you ever get here 

“Well,” said Sumner, “you have been here 
some time now, and become used to your sur- 
roundings; how do things seem to you.!^” 

“Ah,” said Nesmith, with a sly twinkle, “now 
I wonder how the rest of you got here.” 

From that day on, he was the recognized wit of 

L 


146 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


the Senate, and when his great friend Sumner died, 
he delivered the most splendid eulogy that was 
pronounced in the Senate Chamber. 

An interesting feature of many of the great politi- 
cal meetings in Western backwoods times was the 
barbecue^ which usually went with it. Instead of 
taking up a collection of money for campaign pur- 
poses, the political committees would go about 
through the neighborhood and get donations of 
fat steers and sheep and hogs. These would 
be brought the day before the meeting, and 
slaughtered and hung up to cool. A long trench 
was dug, in which a big fire was kept burning for 
many hours, and about midnight before the day of 
the meeting the animals were put whole in this 
trench over the glowing coals.- They were skew- 
ered with long green poles, and very carefully 
looked after for about twelve hours, until they 
were thoroughly cooked. By noon on the great 
day the crowd gathered, from twenty to thirty 
miles about, and there were often thousands of 
men and women and children in the big grove, 
whose nostrils, taking in the savory smell from 
the barbecue pit, were making their appetites rav- 
enous. An army of men cut up the meat, and 
served it hot with huge hunks of bread and cucum- 
ber pickles. I have never seen such appetites 
anywhere else on earth as were exhibited at those 


LEGEND AND BARBECUE 


147 


political barbecues. After everybody was full of 
the roasted meat, the speaking would begin, and 
go on through the afternoon. Whatever may 
have been the vote-making power of the barbecue, 
its magnetism to draw an audience has never been 
equalled. 


XVIII 


NEAR TO nature’s HEART 

One of the delightful things of frontier life, and 
one that adds a charm of romance and mystery to 
every day’s experience, is a friendship with nature 
at first hand, while yet untamed. In my boyhood I 
knew by sight all the birds and animals of the region, 
and stored up a fund of knowledge concerning 
their habits that has been a source of joy and 
profit to me ever since. It was always a great 
pleasure to me to seek out the nests of wild birds, 
for in the springtime on the frontier, before the 
birds had been scared away from the haunts of 
men and many species of them exterminated, the 
whole world seemed one vast bird’s nest. 

The little swallow builds its nest under the eaves 
of the old log barn, or up under the split board 
roof above the hay-mow. Of all the birds, the 
swallow sticks to mankind the closest, unless it 
be the English sparrow, which I never saw until 
I came east of the Rocky Mountains. 

The meadow-lark, one of the sweetest of Oregon 
148 


NEAR TO nature’s HEART I49 

singers, builds out on the open prairie, or in the 
field, in the early spring, down on the ground in 
some crack made by the hoof of an ox or a horse 
when the ground is soft. The quiet colored mother 
lark is so like the weeds and grass about her that 
you may step over her without discovering the 
place of her nest. 

The blackbirds build in colonies about some 
marsh, or where the water eddies back in some 
lowland beside a running stream where the tall 
rushes grow. There, many a time, I have waded 
in among the reeds where there were a hundred 
nests built close together ; nests built of the tough 
grass lined with hair and lashed on to one of the 
reed stalks, or perhaps more frequently tied to a 
stalk on either side and far enough up to be above 
high water. The old birds would be very much 
excited when I came wading toward their nesting 
place, and every anxious mother and red-winged 
mate would shout to me in shrillest tones to go 
away about my business. 

The wild duck, too, builds close to the water, so 
that her awkward little brood may soon learn to 
use their paddles. I made a regular business 
of hunting for wild ducks’ nests every spring, 
and would take the eggs home and set them under 
a hen. I do not remember a single season during 
all my boyhood when we did not have at least one 


150 AN OREGON BOYHOOD 

brood of Mallard ducks from the wild ducks’ eggs. 
When first hatched out they would be very wild, 
and were into the water the moment the shell was 
off their backs, if they had a chance, to the great 
perplexity and sorrow of the old hen. We had 
one old hen that brought up three broods of wild 
ducks, one year after another, and then died of 
rheumatism from wading in the water so much 
from her anxiety over her strange flocks. Poor 
old biddy, she never could get used to their 
queer ways. A strange thing about it was, 
that though these little ducks were so wild when 
they first hatched out, they soon became just as 
gentle and tame as any other fowl about the 
place. 

The grouse and pheasants and quail build their 
nests, usually, back in the forests in the uphill 
pastures. The quail are very lazy about nest- 
building, and often four or five hen quail will lay 
together. I have seen fifty quail eggs in a heap 
before they were ready to try to sit on them. I 
have tried a great many times to raise grouse and 
pheasants and quail by the aid of a hen, the same 
way that we did the ducks, but though they would 
often hatch out, they all died young. When the 
quail are trapped full-grown, however, and kept 
shut up for a while, they soon become very tame, 
and after a little while can be let out with the 


NEAR TO nature’s HEART 


I5I 

chickens without any danger of their running 
away, if they are kindly treated and well fed. 

I used to like to hunt for the yellowhammer’s 
nest, and it was not easy to find ; for though they 
often build in a hollow limb, or tree, a plucky old 
bird is just as likely as not to pick out a stump 
that looks perfectly sound on the outside, and, 
beginning about six inches from the top, peck out 
a hole big enough to let the builder’s body in, and 
then dig down on the inside, cleaning out the 
wood as he goes, until his nest is from one to two 
feet below where he eaters the stump. His brood 
is very warm and snug in there out of the storm 
and the cold. 

The kingfisher’s nest was also interesting, be- 
cause so hard to find. I hunted for them many 
a long day before I found one ; but finally discov- 
ered one in a hole that ran into a high clay-bank, 
overlooking a deep fishing-hole in the stream. 
The kingfisher had dug this hole in the clay as 
the yellowhammer does in the wooden stump. 
He lives in a “dug-out,” like the early settlers in 
Nebraska or the Dakotas. He depends for his 
living, both for himself and his little ones, on div- 
ing for fish in the stream that runs under his nest. 

The great, long-legged cranes often build their 
nests on the top of some bald mountain, far away 
from the farms and the town, in some little pond 


152 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


or lake. They are like the blackbirds in seeking 
for a place where the reeds and the rushes are 
thick, only they get inside the reeds, where they 
are beginning to be scarce on account of the 
deeper water, and selecting a few stout reeds for 
anchors, or hitching posts, they cut down an abun- 
dance of the long tree-like stems of the reeds and 
rushes, and build there, where the water is as deep 
as they can wade with their long legs, a big float- 
ing raft, on which they put .their nest. A nest for 
a crane must take as much time, or more, than 
for a frontier settler to build his log-cabin. I 
found a crane’s nest once in a little lake on the 
mountain top, where the floating raft of reeds on 
which it was built was two or three feet thick and 
four or five feet across. The nest was built on 
top of it. It rode the water as gracefully as 
a ship. 

Crows take a good deal of trouble in building 
their nests, up in the top of some wide-spreading 
oak or maple tree, where the branches are thick, 
and they are likely to clean it up and use it over 
again a good many times. 

Of all the birds I know about, the magpie is the 
most cunning with regard to its nest. He first 
gathers a great mass of large limbs, sometimes 
three or four feet long, for the base work in the 
crotch of some tree, and then builds a very deli- 


NEAR TO nature’s HEART 1 53 

cate little nest of fine twigs and hair or wool, and 
then covers it over the top with a mass of limbs, 
still greater than he had for the base of it, leav- 
ing it so that he has to come in underneath and 
go up a crooked route, doubling himself up, in 
order to get in. He evidently does this to keep 
other birds from stealing his eggs. It is a case 
of guilty conscience with the magpie, for he is the 
shrewdest and most shameless thief in the woods. 
He is forever stealing the crows’ eggs, but is so 
careful about the building of his nest that the 
crow never gets a chance to even up with him. 

Magpies are very bright birds in every way, and 
make delightful pets. I have tamed many of 
them, taking them either from their nests or capt- 
uring them when they were first beginning to fly. 
I kept them in a large cage made of round willow 
sticks, giving them plenty of room, and they soon 
became thoroughly adapted to the situation. They 
are great mimics, and can be taught to talk fully 
as well as a parrot. They will imitate every sound 
that is heard about the place, — the dog, the cat, 
chickens, turkeys, ducks; you will hear the mag- 
pie getting over the whole list of sounds in the 
morning before the rest of the ranch is awake. 

I once had a little magpie that was not very 
well feathered out ; and, as the nights were pretty 
cold, he was put every evening into an old stock- 


154 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


ing, and he would snuggle contentedly in that till 
morning, and enjoyed it so long as he was alone 
in the cage. One day I brought home three other 
young magpies who were well feathered out and 
just beginning to fly. When roosting-time came, 
they settled themselves upon the perch, and little 
Bob was put in his stocking as usual, but rebelled 
at once, and would back out as fast as he could 
be put in. He had found out he was a magpie, 
and his soul loathed stocking legs. Poor fellow ! 
his pride was his undoing. He took a severe cold 
from which he never recovered. 

However, of all the pets I ever had, a sand-hill 
crane was the most dignified and interesting. It 
had been hurt some way when about half-grown, 
and captured and kept on a ranch. I came to 
own it when it was full-grown, and it was a very 
large and splendid specimen. It was as gentle 
as a kitten and very partial to human fellowship. 
If allowed to be in the front yard, it would peck 
holes in the wire screen to indicate its desire to 
come in and be with the folks. Once when tied 
by one leg to a tree to keep it away from the 
screen-door, it carefully eyed the knot for some 
time, and, discovering that it was a slip-noose, it 
ran its long bill down next its leg and, working 
the noose loose, deliberately lifted its foot out, and 
went stalking back to the door in triumph. Its 


NEAR TO NATURE S HEART 


155 


faculty of imitation often led it into mischief. The 
small articles of the laundry were often spread on 
some currant bushes near the house ; and the 
crane had noticed that when they were gathered 
up they were spread on top of each other, one 
by one, and were sometimes patted down to make 
them lie well in the pile. The next time they 
were put out, the crane was noticed to march over 
to the bushes, and, taking the pieces, one after 
another, in his bill, he laid them down in a pile, 
and then bestowed upon them a decided slap with 
his foot, leaving much more than “ hens’ tracks ” 
on each article. 

In connection with this crane was a striking 
illustration of the strange friendships that will 
often be formed between birds of differing species. 
We had among the turkeys a very fine young 
bronze gobbler, who took a great fancy to the 
crane and followed him about with the devotion 
of Ruth for her mother-in-law. It seemed to an- 
noy the crane very much at first, but after a while 
he became accustomed to it, and seemed to even 
reciprocate the young gobbler’s affection. After 
a little, the turkey refused to be separated from 
his long-legged friend at night, and, instead of 
roosting in a tree with the other turkeys, would 
stand out on a little elevation of ground where 
the crane always took his place for the night. 


156 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


After that, they were inseparable companions 
either day or night; and when the crane would 
go down the yard stretching his wings to shoo 
the chickens, imitating a girl shaking her apron 
at them, the gobbler would clumsily attempt the 
same performance. 



“ Stretching' Ilis Wings to Shoo the Chickens.” 


Page loG 





XIX 


FRONTIER COLLEGE LIFE 

When I reached the mature age of eleven years, 
my father and mother decided, after a long and 
serious family council, to remove to the newly 
started town of Philomath — some twenty miles 
from our farm — in order that I might have a 
chance to prosecute my studies. Although the 
district schools had held but six or eight months 
in the year, and were often of an inferior quality, 
my parents had so determinedly kept me at my 
books, between my hunting and fishing spells, 
that I was ready to enter the collegiate depart- 
ment in my twelfth year, and had the honor 
to be the youngest student in the department 
throughout my connection with the school. 

While this school lacked of being a college 
everything except students and teachers, it had 
yet many advantages to a vigorous mind that was 
really inquisitive to know things. There was no 
college library at first, no laboratory, — absolutely 
nothing but a blackboard, — and it was a battle 
*57 


158 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


royal between the student, the text-book, and the 
professors. The teachers were good in the main ; 
and among the students those who were deter- 
mined to get an education at all hazards made 
rapid progress. There was great freedom of 
movement, and the quick, wide-awake youth was 
not held back by the slow ones. 

I had three fellow-students who interested me 
very much. One of them was fully twice my 
age, and it was a very odd friendship that sprang 
up between us. It was absolutely impossible for 
him to learn languages, nor could he learn any- 
thing else very well. I think he had the most 
sluggish mind I have ever seen in a man who 
really was determined to make something of him- 
self. I used to do my best to help him out. 
Week after week, I would write out his trans- 
lations for him ; and I think I was comparatively 
innocent, for I do not remember that it ever oc- 
curred to me as an unfair sort of thing to do. 
We were not put on our honor about those things 
as they are in the best colleges now, and a boy’s 
conscience was not likely to hurt him much 
because he had outwitted the teacher, unless his 
sin was emphasized by his being caught at it 
and punished for it. This young man managed 
to push his way through by such help until ex- 
amination days, and then he was always in dis- 


FRONTIER COLLEGE LIFE 


159 


grace, for it was impossible to help him much 
on- such occasions. It was the general opinion 
of the teachers and the students that when he 
left school, after four years’ attendance, he was 
the dullest scholar that had been seen there. 

His future career, however, was quite suggestive. 
He attended a medical college for two years, and, 
failing to pass, went back for a third year. Then, 
failing to pass, he went away and practised medi- 
cine for two years, and as he made a decided suc- 
cess as a practising physician, the medical faculty 
finally gave him his diploma. As soon as he 
secured this he removed to another section of 
country, where he was entirely unknown, and set 
up as a full-fledged physician. His success was 
instantaneous. There was no starving period for 
him, and yet there were none of the elements of 
the ordinary quack about him. He was altogether 
too slow to advertise himself, but he had a wonder- 
ful faculty of being silent, and looking wise, and 
the added advantage of having a large and impos- 
ing physical make-up. His practice grew and 
spread until he was in demand for forty miles 
around. He was in his buggy day and night, and 
literally wore his life out in his remarkable popular 
success as a physician. He died before he was 
thirty-five, a martyr to his prosperity, having made 
a respectable fortune out of his business, and leav- 


i6o 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


ing behind him a most enviable reputation as a 
great and good physician. Anybody can point 
the moral who wants to : I simply record the facts 
without malice toward any of my friends in the 
medical fraternity. 

Another young fellow who greatly interested me 
had the most remarkable mathematical mind I have 
ever known. It seems to have been a natural 
gift to him. Within six months from the time he 
began the study of algebra he could master any 
problem given in the text-books. Within a year 
he was superior as a mathematician to any of the 
teachers in the school. He grasped a mathemati- 
cal problem at once with a clearness of perception 
that I have never witnessed in any one else. The 
strange thing about it was that he did not know 
anything else at all. He was a nonentity in all his 
other studies. He cared for nothing except mathe- 
matics ; there he revelled like an eagle in the upper 
sunshine. I have always believed that with a 
proper environment and opportunity he would 
have made one of the most famous mathematicians 
of the time. He has been a fairly successful busi- 
ness man in a small way, and has never had any 
chance to use the great gift that was bestowed 
upon him. 

The other youth that made the greatest impres- 
sion of the three was my special chum and bosom 


FRONTIER COLLEGE LIFE l6l 

companion. Oftentimes we spent our Saturday 
vacation together, with our guns, in the foot-hills 
near by, hunting for grouse and pheasants. One 
Saturday we started out in this way for an after- 
noon together, but paused on the outskirts of the 
town, where some men were moving a dwelling- 
house by means of a horse and block and tackle. 
My friend stepped up into the doorway of the 
house while it was stationary, and set the butt of 
his gun down on the doorsill in front of him. 
Suddenly the horse was started up, and the build- 
ing gave a quick lurch forward. His gun was 
jarred off the sill, striking the hammer, and the 
load of shot was discharged at short range into his 
body. I never shall forget his scream or the look 
on his face, “ My God, I am shot ! I will die ! ” 
We managed to get him home to his mother, one 
of the gentlest and sweetest of women, and he died 
in her arms a few hours later. The incident made 
a terrible impression on my mind, from which I 
doubt if I have entirely recovered after all the 
years that have gone between; for sometimes, 
even now, in the quiet of the night, I see the face 
of my old chum, and hear his heart-breaking cry. 
It was months before I could take down my gun 
again, and for a long time I thought I never should 
care for it any more. 

It may have been the deep solemnity with which 

M 


62 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


this sad happening impressed me, that made me 
the more easily susceptible to the religious teach- 
ing of a series of revival meetings in the college 
chapel the following winter. At any rate the great 
event of my boyhood, and that which has had 
more to do with my after life than anything else, 
occurred on “ watch-night ” after my fourteenth 
birthday. As those who have read these pages 
will understand, I had been reared from babyhood 
under the most positive Christian influences, and 
had never fallen into outbreaking wicked habits ; 
yet I felt that some deeper religious experience 
was possible, and desirable, and had many times 
had a great longing to experience what I was 
accustomed to hear people call “religion.” 

My conversion finally came about in this way : 
There was a watch-night service in the chapel, and 
the young president of the college, the Rev. Albert 
L. Biddle, who is, if I mistake not, a Congrega- 
tional pastor somewhere in Connecticut at the 
present time, had preached a very striking and 
earnest discourse on the subject of “ Eternity.” At 
the close of the sermon, and in that solemn hour 
before midnight, an invitation was given for all 
those whose desired to begin the New Year with 
a new confidence in God, and a new hope and trust 
in Christ, to come forward and kneel at the altar 
for prayers. I very much desired to go, but did 


FRONTIER COLLEGE LIFE 1 63 

not have the courage to make the start, until an 
old class-leader, a carpenter, with one leg a little 
shorter than the other, which gave him a very 
decided limp in his walk, came down th*e aisle from 
behind me. I stood at the end of the seat, and as 
the old man came up he laid his hand on my 
shoulder and said, “ Louis, isn’t this a good time 
for you to start ? ” As he uttered the words, the 
weight of his body came down on his short leg, and 
the emphasis of his limp was felt in the press- 
ure of his hand on my shoulder, pushing me a 
step out into the aisle. Once started, I walked 
right on until I reached the altar. I have often 
said it was the weight of the old man’s limp that 
turned the balance in my case. 

I did not find the peace I desired that evening, 
and returned home a little after midnight in a 
very perplexed and sorrowful state of mind. I 
retired to my own room, but not to sleep. In the 
dark hours of the night I fought out the greatest 
battle of my life, and just before dawn I made up 
my mind that for all my future life, whatever else 
happened, I was to be a Christian boy and man. 
Then there came a great peace and comfort into 
my heart. It so filled me with joy and delight 
that I was carried away with its ecstasy, and 
following out my impulsive temperament, I ran 
into the room where my father and mother were 


164 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


sound asleep, and roused them from their slumbers 
by my joyous exclamations, “ I’ve got religion. I’ve 
got religion ! ” 

The joy of my parents at this new experience 
that had come to me was unbounded, and they 
were wise enough, and spiritual-minded enough, 
to enter with the fullest sympathy into my glad- 
ness. The experiences of life since then have 
been varied, but amid all the perplexities and 
mysteries of my soul, many of them still unsolved, 
I have never doubted the genuineness of the 
fellowship into which I entered with Jesus Christ 
in the dawning of that New Year’s morning. 


XX 


OUT OF BOYHOOD INTO MANHOOD 

During the last year in college, the summer 
before my sixteenth birthday, I became ambitious 
to help on with my own expenses, and secured 
a small district school to teach, about six miles 
away from the college town. It seems remarkable 
to me, as I think back over it, that the directors 
ever should have been inveigled into letting me 
have the school. I was very small for my age at 
that time, and gave no promise whatever of the 
stalwart physical proportions to which I was after- 
ward to attain. But my teachers and the county 
superintendent were partial enough to give me 
such flattering letters of commendation that I 
captured the very first school I undertook. 

It was not a very ambitious academy. The 
building was made of hewed logs, and had seats 
and rude desks to accommodate about forty chil- 
dren. I was to receive the munificent sum of 
twenty dollars a month, and had the privilege of 
boarding around among the pupils. I did not, 
165 


l66 AN OREGON BOYHOOD 

however, avail myself of that very much, for I 
never before had been away from home except 
with my father, and though I was a pedagogue 
I had yet a boyish heart, and I think that on 
full forty-five of the sixty evenings I walked the 
six miles home, footing it back again next morn- 
ing, rather than stay among strangers. Quite a 
number of the boys and girls were older than I, 
and several of them as large again, but I suc- 
ceeded in having very good discipline, and I think 
closed the term with the affections of my pupils. 

I never shall forget one afternoon, when the 
county school superintendent, who had been my 
teacher at one time, and his wife, who had been 
my classmate, came to visit my school. Their 
attempts to suppress their amusement at the pre- 
tentious dignity with which I ruled over the boys 
and girls so much older and larger than myself 
were exceedingly annoying to me at the time, 
though very funny to think of afterwards. The 
young wife had a quick eye for the humorous, 
anyhow, and she spent most of the afternoon 
stuffing her handkerchief into her mouth to keep 
from disgracing her husband by bursts of laughter. 
He was kind enough, however, to give me a good 
recommendation to all inquiring friends. 

My school days closed with the spring after I 
was sixteen. My mother had been ill for some 


OUT OF BOYHOOD INTO MANHOOD 16/ 

months, and my father, hoping that the change 
would restore her health,- determined on removing 
to Eastern Oregon. Here was a great plateau 
tract of country over which he had come when 
a boy, and had not then regarded it as worth 
settling, but now it was filling up with settlers, 
and the soil was found to be very rich and fer- 
tile. He sold his farm and sheep and other stock, 
except his horses, and one rainy, morning our 
wagon and teams, my saddle horse, and the family 
were put aboard a little steamer at Corvallis, and 
we were afloat on the Willamette River. 

It was only a hundred miles to Portland, but we 
were two whole days and a part of a third making 
the journey. There was plenty of water in the 
river at that season of the year, but the little 
steamer was a traffic boat, and the captain would 
stick its nose into a sand-bank anywhere any one 
waved a handkerchief, either to put aboard a 
passenger or a tub of butter. Every few miles 
we had to stop and load on wood for fuel. There 
were no railroads in the country then, and no coal 
mines had been opened. The fir timber was cut 
into cord wood and hauled and stacked upon the 
river bank for the steamer’s use. Whenever we 
came to one of these wood depots, the steamer 
would stop and the deck hands would scramble 
off and pitch four or five cords of the wood over 
on to the deck. 


I 68 AN OREGON BOYHOOD 

At Oregon City, ten miles above Portland, we 
had to stop and change to another boat below the 
falls in the river, and then at Portland we -changed 
again to the steamer going to the Cascades of the 
Columbia. We left Portland early in the morning, 
and the day up the Columbia was one long to be 
remembered. Although I have been over it a great 
many times since, its splendors of natural scenery 
— the deep dark canons, the rugged cliffs, tower- 
ing mountains, and glorious waterfalls — never 
seemed so wonderful as on that first day when I 
brought to them my fresh, boyish enthusiasm. 

At the Cascades we changed to a little railroad, 
seven miles in length, that carried us about the 
great falls in the Columbia. Making this railroad 
trip we passed close to the old block house that 
once was the scene of some very sharp Indian 
fighting, where General Phil. Sheridan, then a 
lieutenant, earned his first laurels as a fighter. 
We took steamer again above the Cascades, and 
landed forty miles above at the Dalles just at sun- 
set. Father had everything in readiness, and with 
the family in the great covered wagon drove off 
the steamer and up through the town. 

I rode behind on a splendid, high-spirited mare 
which my father had given me, and with which I 
had been unwilling to part. The animal was tired 
of the cramped position on the steamer, and res- 


OUT OF BOYHOOD INTO MANHOOD 169 

tive from not having any exercise for several days, 
and she arched her pretty neck and pranced up 
the street in great style. I was very proud of her. 
On our way to the outskirts of the town where \^e 
were going to camp for the night, a man with 
whom we had been slightly acquainted at home 
stepped out from the loungers and spoke to us. 
He seemed overjoyed to see us, and I noticed that 
he paid a great deal of attention to my horse and 
seemed to admire her very much. He inquired 
where we were going to camp, and while we were 
eating supper by the camp-fire that evening he 
called on us and spent an hour in conversation. 
In the night my father was awakened by a dis- 
turbance among the horses, and stepping quickly 
but silently to the other side of the wagon, where 
they were tied, he was astonished to find our 
whilom guest unloosing my mare. He was just 
in time to save her, for the scoundrel, seeing he 
was discovered, darted away into the darkness 
and we never saw him again. 

The next day we began our long journey over- 
land to the high plateau country between the 
Umatilla River and Walla Walla where my father 
had determined on settling. This journey was a 
very delightful one in every way. The weather 
was beautiful, the air clear and bracing, and the 
long sweeps of bunch grass, fresh and green with 


70 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


their springtime covering, were very pleasing to 
the eye. Here I saw my first jack-rabbits and 
cayotes. A cayote is a small and rather disrepu- 
table sort of wolf. He goes about with a hang- 
dog expression, and is exceedingly disappointing 
to a dog who has a high opinion of his speed 
qualities. We had with us a half-blood hound 
that thought he could catch almost anything that 
ran. At first he would start out after every cay- 
ote that came in sight, and would gain on it very 
fast, but when he came pretty close up, the skulk- 
ing wolf would suddenly tear away from him and 
leave the dog utterly discouraged. The first two 
or three he chased, he followed for a mile or more ; 
but after that he never chased one more than a 
hundred yards. 

My mare, however, was more than a match for 
them, and I could run her right over a cayote 
wherever I had a fair chance. I once got a 
terrible jolting this way, which might have cost 
me my life. These wide bunch grass prairies were 
covered with badger holes. I usually rode with 
a rein so tight that even if the mare put her foot 
in one of these holes I would be able to save her 
from falling ; but one day, chasing a cayote, I be- 
came careless, and her foot sinking into a badger 
hole, she turned a complete somersault, hurling 
me two or three rods ahead. Luckily my feet 


OUT OF BOYHOOD INTO MANHOOD .I71 

went clear of the stirrups, and I landed in such 
a way as not to seriously hurt me, though it 
knocked the breath out of my body for a few 
minutes. The mare also was uninjured — the 
cayote likewise. Many a young fellow out in 
that region would lasso a cayote with a horse 
going at full run in chase. I came to it too late 
in life, or did not stick to it long enough, and 
never got so that I could throw a lasso with suffi- 
cient skill. 

Of all the lonesome and grewsome noises I have 
ever listened to, the howling of a cayote at night 
is the worst. If there are two in the band, a 
stranger to their habits would be willing to swear 
that there were at least a hundred. Soon after 
my father settled in his new home, I got belated 
out in the bunch grass hills where I had been 
hunting cattle, and as night came on, there being 
no landmarks or trail of any kind, it was impossi- 
ble to proceed with safety, and there was nothing 
for me to do but to lay by until morning. I took 
off the saddle and bridle, and took the long stake 
rope which the cow-boy always carries on his 
saddle, and not having any pin with which to 
fasten it, I held one end of it in my hand, the other 
being tied around the horse’s neck. I lay down on 
the ground, wrapping myself in the saddle-blanket 
with my head in the saddle for a pillow, and after 


1/2 


AN OREGON BOYHOOD 


a little, fell into a very sound sleep. I do not know 
how long I slept, but in the night I awoke with a 
start. My horse was standing beside me, and I 
could hear a most awful howling from what I im- 
agined to be packs of prairie wolves. The great 
varieties of tone seemed to make it sure that there 
were at least thirty or forty of the bloodthirsty 
animals. I thought over all the hideous stories I 
had read. Sleighing parties besieged by wolves in 
the forests of Russia and many other such pleasant 
subjects for meditation pursued each other through 
my mind. There was no more sleep for me that 
night. I never welcomed the morning with greater 
joy. As the gray dawn stole over the hills there, 
seated on his hunkers, on a little knoll, a couple 
of hundred yards away, was a single lone cayote, 
who had been the sole disturber of my dreams. I 
have found in later life that usually when I have 
been tempted to give way to panic the enemy was 
about as real as that. 

This great plateau region in which we had settled 
is called over there the “ Inland Empire,” and 
stretches from the Cascades on the west to the 
Blue Hills of Oregon and Washington on the east. 
It is an empire indeed, and in that unsettled period 
it was impossible to stand on any one of its ten 
thousand hillocks and gaze away through the clear- 
est atmosphere imaginable over vast reaches of 


OUT OF BOYHOOD INTO MANHOOD 1 73 

fertile soil ready for the plough without touch of 
the hand of man in preparation, without exclaim- 
ing with Oregon’s poet : 

“ Room! room to turn round in, to breathe and be free, 
And to grow to be a giant, to sail as at sea 
With the speed of the wind on a steed with his mane 
To the wind, without pathway, or route, or a rein. 

“ Room ! room to be free where the white-bordered sea 
Blows a kiss to a brother as boundless as he ; 

And to East and to West, to the North and the Sun, 
Blue skies and brown grasses are welded as one.” 

Breathing the air of that wide freedom, I crossed 
the frontier of my own boyhood, and manhood’s 
hopes beckoned me onward. 


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OLIVER OPTIC’S BOOKS 


All-Over-tlie- World Library, By Oliver Optic. First Series. 
Illustrated. Price per volume, $1.25. 

1. A Missing Million ; or, The Adventures of Louis Belgrade. 
3. A Millionaire at Sixteen; ok, The Cruise of the “Guardian 
Mother.” 

3. A Ifoung Knight Errant; or, Cruising in the West Indies. 

4. Strange Sights Abroad; or, Adventures in European Waters. 

No author has come before the public during the present generation who 
has achieved a larger and more deserving popularity among young people than 
“ Oliver Optic.” His stories have been very numerous, but they have been 
uniformly excellent in moral tone and literary quality. As indicated in the 
general title, it is the author’s intention to conduct the readers 01 this enter- 
taining series ” around the world.” As a means to this end, the hero of the 
story purchases a steamer which he names the “ Guardian Mother,” and 
with a number of guests she proceeds on her voyage. — Christian Work^ N. Y. 


A1 1-0 ver-the- World Library. By Oliver Optic. Second 
Series. Illustrated. Price per volume, $1.25. 

1. American Boys Afloat; or. Cruising in the Orient. 

3. Tlie IToung Navigators ; or. The Foreign Cruise of the 
“ Maud.” 

3. Up and Down tbe Nile ; or. Young Adventurers in Africa. 

4. Asiatic Breezes; or. Students on the Wing. 

The interest in these stories is continuous, and there is a great variety of 
exciting incident woven into the solid information which the book imparts so 
generously and without the slightest suspicion of dryness. Manly boys 
will welcome this volume as cordially as they did its predecessors. — Boston 
Gazette. 


All-O ver-the- World Library, By Oliver Optic. Third Se- 
ries. Illustrated. Price per volume, $1.25. 

1. Across India ; or. Live Boys in the Far East. 

3 . Half Round tbe World; or. Among the Uncivilized. 

3. Four Young Explorers ; or, Sight-Seeing in the Tropics. 

4. Pacific bbores ; or. Adventures in Eastern Seas. 

Amid such new and varied surroundings it would be surprising indeed if the 
author, with his faculty of making even the commonplace attractive, did not 
tell an intensely interesting story of adventure, as well as give much informa- 
tion in regard to the distant countries throu^ which our friends pass, and 
the strange peoples with whom they are brought in contact. This book, and 
indeed the whole series, is admirably adapted to reading aloud in the familv 
circle, each volume containing matter which will interest all the members of 
the family. — Boston Budget. 

LEE AND SHEPARD, BOSTON, SEND THEIR COMPLETE CATALOGUE FREE. 


OLIVER OPTIC’S BOOKS 


Tho Blue and the Gray — Afloat. By Oliver Optic. Six 
volumes. Illustrated. Beautiful binding in blue and gray, 
with emblematic dies. Cloth. Any volume sold separately. 
Price per volume, $1.50. 


1. Taken by the Enemy. 

2. Within the Enemy’s Lines 

3. On the Blockade. 


4. Stand by the Union. 

6. Figrhting for the Right, 
6. A Victorious Union. 


The Blue and the Gray — on Land. 

1 . Brother against Brother. 3. A Lieutenant at Eighteen. 
3. In the Saddle. 4. On the Staff. 

5. At the Front. 

( Volume Six in preparation i) 

“There never has been a more interesting writer in the field of juvenile 
literature than Mr. W. T. Adams, who, under his well-known pseudonym, is 
known and admired by every boy and girl in the country, and by thousands 
who have long since passed the boundaries of youth, yet who remember with 
pleasure the genial, interesting pen that did so much to interest, instruct, and 
entertain their younger years. ‘The Blue and the Gray’ is a title that is suf- 
ficiently indicative 01 the nature and spirit of the latest series, while the name 
of Oliver Optic is sufficient warrant of the absorbing style of narrative. This 
series is as bright and entertaining as any work that Mr. Adams has yet put 
forth, and will be as eagerly perused as any that has borne his name. It would 
not be fair to the prospective reader to deprive him of the zest which comes 
from the unexpected by entering into a synopsis of the story. A word, how- 
ever, should be said in regard to the beauty and appropriateness of the binding, 
which makes it a most attractive volume.” — Boston Budget. 

Woodville Stories* By Oliver Optic. Six volumes. Illus- 
trated. Any volume sold separately. Price per volume, $1.25. 

1. Rich and Humble; or, The Mission of Bertha Grant. 

2. In School and Out; or. The Conquest of Richard Grant. 

3. Watch and Wait; or, The Young Fugitives. 

4. Work and Win; or. Noddy Newman on a Cruise. 

6. Hope and Have; or, Fanny Grant among the Indians 

6. Haste and Waste; or. The Young Pilot of Lake Champlain. 

“Though we are not so young as we once were, we relished these stories 
almost as much as the boys and girls for whom they were written. They we* t- 
really refreshing, even to us. There is much in them which is calculated a 
inspire a generous, healthy ambition, and to make distasteful all reading te:.d- 
ing to stimulate base desires.” — Fitchburg Reveille. 

The Starry Flag* Series. By Oliver Optic. In six volumes. 
Illustrated. Any volume sold separately. Price per volume, 
$1.25. 

1. The Starry Flag; or, The Young Fisherman of Cape Ann. 

. 2. Breaking Away; or. The Fortunes of a Student. 

3. Seek and Find; or. The Adventures of a Smart Boy. 

4 . Freaks of Fortune; or. Half round the World. 

6. Make or Break; or. The Rjch Man’s Daughter. 

6. Down the River; or. Buck Bradford and the Tyrants. 

“ Mr. Adams, the celebrated and popular writer, familiarly known as Oliver 
Optic, seems to have inexhaustible funds for weaving together the virtuf^f ol 
life; and, notwithstanding he has written scores of books, the same freshnesi 
and novelty run through them all. Some people think the sensational element 
predominates. Perhaps it does. But a book fbr young people needs this, and 
so long as good sentiments are inculcated such books ought to be read.” 


LEE AND SHEPARD, BOSTON, SEND THEIR COMPLETE CATALOGUE FREL 


OLIVER OPTIC’S BOOKS 


The Great Western Series. By Oliver Optic. In six vol- 
umes. Illustrated. Any volume sold separately. Price per 
volume, $1.25. 

1. Going West; or, The Perils of a Poor* Boy. 

2. Out West; or, Roughing it on the Great Lakes. 

3. Lake Breezes; or, The Cruise of the Sylvania. 

4. Going South; or, Yachting on the Atlantic Coast. 

6. Down South; or, Yacht Adventures in Florida. 

6. Up the Kiver; or. Yachting on the Mississippi. 

“ This is the latest series of books issued by this popular writer, and deals 
with life on the Great Lakes, for which a careful study was made by the author 
in a summer tour of the immense water sources of America. The story, which 
carries the same hero through the six books of the series, is always entertain- 
ing, novel scenes and varied incidents giving a constantly changing yet always 
attractive aspect to the narrative. Oliver Optic has written nothing better.” 

The Yacht Club Series. By Oliver Optic. In six volumes. 
Illustrated. Any volume sold separately. Price per volume, 
$1.25. 

1. Little Bohtail; or. The Wreck of the Penobscot. 

2. The Yacht Club; or. The Young Boat Builders. 

3. Money-Maker; or. The Victory of the Basilisk. 

4. The Coming Wave; or. The Treasure of High Rock. 

6. The Dorcas Club; or. Our Girls Afloat. 

6. Ocean Born; or. The Cruise of the Clubs. 

“ The series has this peculiarity, that all of its constituent volumes are inde- 
pendent of one another, and therefore each story is complete in itself. Oliver 
Optic is, perhaps, the favorite author of the boys and girls of this country, and 
he seems destined to enjov an endless popularity. He deserves his success, 
for he makes very interesting stories, and inculcates none but the best senti- 
ments, and the ‘ Yacht Club’ is no exception to this rule.” — New Haven 
journal and Courier. 

Onward and Upward Series. By Oliver Optic. In six 
volumes. Illustrated. Any volume sold separately. Price 
per volume, $1.25. 

1. Field and Forest; or. The Fortunes of a Farmer. 

2. Plane and Plank; or. The Mishaps of a Mechanic. 

3. Desk and Debit; or. The Catastrophes of a Clerk. 

4 . Cringle and Crosstree; or. The Sea Swashes of a Sailor. 

6. Bivouac and Battle; or. The Struggles of a Soldier. 

C. Sea and Shore; or. The Tramps of a Traveller. 

” Paul Farringford, the hero of these tales, is, like most of this author’s 
heroes, a young man of high spirit, and of high aims and correct principles, 
appearing in the different volumes as a farmer, a captain, a bookkeeper, a 
soldier, a sailor, and a traveller. In all of them the hero meets with very 
exciting adventures, told in the graphic style for which the author is famous.” 

The Lake Shore Series. By Oliver Optic. In six volumes. 
Illustrated. Any volume sold separately. Price per volume, 
$1.25. 

1. Through by Daylight; or. The Young Engineer of the Lake 

Shore Railroad. 

2. Lightning Express; or. The Rival Academies. 

3. On Time; or. The Young Captain of the Ucayga Steamer. 

4. Switch Off; OR, The War of the Students. 

6. Brake Up; or. The Young Peacemakers. 

6. Bear and Forbear; or. The Young Skipper of Lake Ucayga. 

“ Oliver Optic is one of the most fascinating writers for youth, and withal 
one of the best to be found in this or any past age. Troops of young people 
hang over his vivid pages ; and not one of them ever learned to be mean, ignoble, 
cowardly, selfish, or to yield to any vice from anything they ever read from his 
pen.” — Providence Press, 

LEE AND SHEPARD; BOSTON, SEND THEIR COMPLETE CATALOGUE FREE. 


OLIVER OPTICS BOOKS 


The Famous Boat Club Series. By Oliver Optic. Six 
volumes. Illustrated. Any volume sold separately. Price 
per volume $1.25. 

1. The Boat Cluh ; or, The Bunkers of Rippleton. 

3. All Aboard; or, Life on the Lake. 

3. Now or Never; or. The Adventures of Bobby Bright. 

4. Try Again; or. The Trials and Triumphs of Harry West. 

5. Poor and Proud ; or. The Fortunes of Katy Redburn. 

«. liittle by Little ; ok. The Cruise of the Flyaway. 

“ This is the first series of books written for the young by Oliver Optic. 
It laid the foundation for his fame as the first of authors in which the young 
delight, and gained for him the title of the Prince of Story Tellers. The six 
books are varied in incident and plot, but all are entertaining and original.” 

(Oiher volumes in preparation.) 

Young* America Abroad: A Library of Travel and 
Adventure in Foreign Lands. By Oliver Optic. Illus- 
trated by Nast and others. First Series. Six volumes. 
Any volume sold separately. Price per volume, $1.25. 

1. Outward Bound; or. Young America Afloat. 

2. Shamrock and Thistle; or, Young America in Ireland and 

Scotland. 

3. Red Cross; or, Young America in England and Wales. 

4. Dikes and Ditches; or, Young America in Holland and 

Belgium. 

6. Palace and Cottage; or, Young America in France and 

Switzerland. 

6. Down the Rhine; or. Young America in Germany, 

” The story from its inception, and through the twelve volumes (see Second 
Series), is a bewitching one, while the information imparted concerning the 
countries of Europe and the isles of the sea is not only correct in every particu- 
lar, but is told in a captivating style. Oliver Optic will continue to be the 
boys’ friend, and his pleasant books will continue to be read by thousands of 
American boys. What a fine holiday present either or both series of ‘ Young 
America Abroad ’ would be for a young friend ! It would make a little library 
highly prized by the recipient, and would not be an expensive one.” — Provi- 
dence Press. 

Young America Abroad. By Oliver Optic. Second Series. 
Six volumes. Illustrated. Any volume sold separately. 
Price per volume, $1.25. 

1. Up the Baltic; or, Young America in Norway, Sweden, and 

, Denmark. 

2. Northern Lands; or, Young America in Russia and Prussia. 

3. Cross and Crescent; or. Young America in Turkey and Greece. 

4. Sunny Shores; or. Young America in Italy and Austria. 

6. Vine and Olive; or. Young America in Spain and Portugal. 

6. Isles of the Sea; or. Young America Homeward Bound. 

“ Oliver Optic is a nom de plume that is known and loved by almost every 
boy of intelligence in the land. We have seen a highly intellectual and world- 
weary man, a cynic whose heart was somewhat embittered by its large experi- 
ence of human nature, take up one of Oliver Optic’s books, and read it at a 
sitting, neglecting his work in yielding to the fascination of the pages. When 
a mature and exceedingly well-informed mind, long despoiled of all its fresh- 
ness, can thus find pleasure in a book for boys, no additional words of recom 
mendation are needed.” — Sunday Times. 


LEE AND SKEPARD. BOSTON, SEND THEIR COMPLETE CATALOGUE FREE. 


OLIVER OPTICS BOOKS 


Army and Navy Stories. By Oliver Optic. Six volumes. 
Illustrated. Any volume sold separately. Price per volume, 
$1.25. 

1. The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army. 

2. The Sailor Boy; or, Jack Somers in the Navy. 

3. The Young Liieutenant; or. Adventures of an Army Officer. 

4. The Yankee Middy; or. Adventures of a Navy Officer. 

6. Fighting Joe; or. The Fortunes of a Staff Officer. 

6. Brave Old Salt; or. Life on the Quarter Deck. 

“ This series of six volumes recounts the adventures of two brothers, Tom 
and Jack Somers, one in the army, the other in the navy, in the great Civil War, 
The romantic narratives of the fortunes and exploits of the brothers are thrill- 
ing in the extreme. Historical accuracy in the recital of the great events of 
that period is strictly followed, and the result is, not only a library of entertain- 
ing volumes, but also the best history of the Civil War for young people ever 
written.” 


Boat Builders Series. By Oliver Optic. In six volumes. 
Illustrated. Any volume sold separately. Price per volume, 
$1.25. 

1. All Adrift; or. The Goldwing Club. 

2. Snug Harbor; or. The Champlain Mechanics. 

3. Square and Compasses; or. Building the House. 

4. Stem to Stern; or. Building the Boat. 

6. All Taut; or. Rigging the Boat. 

6. Ready About; or. Sailing the Boat. 

“ The series includes in six successive volumes the whole art of boat building, 
boat rigging, boat mana.ging, and practical hints to make the ownership of a 
boat pay. A great deal of useful information is given in this Boat Builders 
Series, and in '*ach book a very interesting story is interwoven with the infor- 
mation. Every reader will be interested at once in Dory, the hero of ‘ All 
Adrift,* and one of the characters retained in the subsequent volumes of the 
series. His friends will not want to lose sight of him, and every boy who 
makes his acquaintance in ‘ All Adrift ’ will become his friend.” 


Riverdale Story Books. By Oliver Optic. Twelve vol- 
umes. Illustrated. Illuminated covers. Price: cloth, per 
set, $3.60; per volume, 30 cents; paper, per set, $2.00. 


Little Merchant. 

7 . 

Young Voyagers. 

8 . 

Christmas Gift, 

9 . 

Dolly and 1. 

10. 

Uncle Ben. 

11. 

Birthday Party. 

12. 


Proud and Lazy. 
Careless Kate, 
Robinson Crusoe, Jr. 
The Picnic Party. 
The Gold Thimble. 
The Do-Somethings. 


Riverdale Story Books. By Oliver Optic. Six volumes. 
Illustrated. Fancy cloth and colors. Price per volume, 30 
cents. 


Little Merchant. 

4. 

Careless Kate. 

Proud and Lazy. 

6. 

Dolly and I. 

Young Voyagers. 

6. 

Robinson Crusoe, Jr. 


Flora Bee Library. By Oliver Optic. Six volumes. Illus- 
trated. Fancy cloth and colors. Price per volume, 30 
cents. 

1. The Picnic Party. 4. Christmas Gift. 

2. The Gold Thimble. 6. Uncle Ben. 

3. The Do- Somethings. 6. Birthday Party. 

These are bright short stories for younger children who are unable to com- 
prehend the starry Flag Series or the Army and Navy Series. But they 
all display the author’s talent for pleasing and interesting the little folks. They 
are all fresh and original, preaching no sermons, but inculcating good lessons. 


LEE AND SHEPARD, BOSTON, SEND THEIR COMPLETE CATALOGUE FRFF. 


OLIVER OPTIC’S BOOKS 


The Way of the World. By Oliver Optic. Illustrated. 
$1.50. 

“ One of the most interesting American novels we have ever read.” — Phila- 
delphia City Item. 

“This story treats of a fortune of three million dollars left a youthful heir. 
The volume bears evidence in every chapter of the fresh, original, and fascinat- 
ing style which has always enlivened Mr. Adams’ productions. We have the 
same felicitous manner of working out the plot by conversation, the same 
quaint wit and humor, and a class of characters which stand out boldly, pea 
photographs of living beings. 

“ The book furnishes a most romantic and withal a most instructive illustra- 
tion of the way of the world in its false estimate of money.” 

Living* too Fast; or, the Confessions of a Bank Officer. 
By Oliver Optic. Illustrated. $1.50. 

This story records the experience of a bank officer in the downward career of 
crime. The career ought, perhaps, to have ended in the State’s prison; but 
the author chose to represent the defaulter as sharply punished in another way. 
The book contains a most valuable lesson; and shows, in another leading 
character, the true life which a young business man ought to lead. 

In Doors and Out ; or, Views from a Chimney Corner. By 
Oliver Optic. Illustrated. $1.50. 

“ Many who have not time and patience to wade through a long story will 
find here many pithy and sprightly tales, each sharply hitting some social 
absurdity or social vice. We recommend the book heartily after h.aving read 
the three chapters on ‘Taking a Newspaper.” If all the rest are as sensible 
and interesting as these, and doubtless they are, the book is well worthy of 
patronage.” — Vermont Record. 

“ As a writer of domestic stories, Mr. William T. Adams (Oliver Optic) 
made his mark even before he became so immensely popular through his 
splendid books for the young. In the volume before us are given several of 
these tales, and they comprise a book which will give them a popularity greater 
than they have ever before enjoyed. Th^ are written in a spirited style, 
impart valuable practical lessons, and are of the most lively interest.” — Boston 
Home Journal. 

Our Standard Bearer. A Life of Gen. U. S. Grant. By 
Oliver Optic. Illustrated by Thomas Nast. Illuminated 
covers, $1.50. 

It has long been out of print, but now comes out in a new edition, with a 
narrative of the civil career of the General as President for two terms, his 
remarkable journey abroad, his life in New York, and his sickness, death, and 
burial. Perhaps the reader will remember that the narrative is told by 
“ Captain Galligasken ” after a style that is certainly not common or tiresome, 
but, rather, in a direct, simple, picturesque, and inspiring way that wins the 
heart of the young reader. For the boy who wants to read the life of General 
Grant, this book is the best that has been published, — perhaps the only one 
that is worth any consideration. 

Just His Luck. By Oliver Optic. Illustrated. $1.00. 

“ It deals with real flesh and blood boys ; with boys who possess many nohle 
qualities of mind ; with boys of generous impulses and large hearts ; with boys 
who delight in playing pranks, and who are ever ready for any sort of mischief; 
and with boys in whom human nature is strongly engrafted. They are boys, 
as many of us have been; boys in the true, unvarnished sense of the word; 
boys with hopes, ideas, and inspirations, but lacking in judgment, self-control, 
and discipline. And the book contains an appropriate moral, teaches many a 
lesson, and presents many a precept worthy of being followed. It is a capital 
book for boys.” 


LEE AND SHEPARD, BOSTON, SEND THEIR COMPLETE CATALOGUE FREE. 


J. T. TROWBRIDGE’S BOOKS 


THE SILVER MEDAL STORIES. 6 volumes. 

Tlie Silver Medal, and Other Stories. By J. T. Trow- 
bridge. Illustrated. $1.25. 

There were some schoolboys who had turned housebreakers, and among their 
plunder was a silver medal that had been given to one John Harrison by the 
llumane Society for rescuing from drowning a certain Benton Barry. Now 
Benton Barry was one of the wretched housebreakers. This is the summary 
of the opening chapter. The story is intensely interesting in its serious as 
well as its humorous parts. 

His Own Master. ByJ. T. Trowbridge. Illustrated. $1.25. 

“ This is a book after the typical boy’s own heart. Its hero is a plucky young 
fellow, who, seeing no chance for himself at home, determines to make his own 
way in the world. . . . He sets out accordingly, trudges to the far West, and 
finds the road to fortune an unpleasantly rough one.” — Philadelphia Inquirer. 

“ We class this as one of the best stories for boys we ever read. The tone is 
perfectly healthy, and the interest is kept up to the end.” — Boston Home 
yournal. 

Bound in Honor, ByJ. T. Trowbridge. Illustrated. $1.25. 

This story is of a lad, who, though not guilty of any bad action, had been an 
•ye-witness of the conduct of his comrades, and felt ” Bound in Honor” not 
to tell. 

” The glimpses we get of New England character are free from any distor- 
tion, and their humorous phases are always entertaining. Mr. Trowbridge’s 
brilliant descriptive faculty is shown to great advantage in the opening chapter 
of the book by a vivid picture of a village fire, and is manifested elsewhere with 
equally telling effect.” — Boston Courier. 

The Pocket Rifle. By J. T. Trowbridge. Illustrated. $1.25. 

“ A boy’s story which will be read with avidity, as it ought to be, it is so 
brightly and frankly written, and with such evident knowledge of the tempera- 
ments and habits, the friendships and enmities of schoolboys.” — New York 
Mail. 

“ This is a capital story for boys. ’Trowbridge never tells a story poorly. 
It teaches honesty, integrity, and friendship, and how best they can be pro- 
moted. It shows the danger of hasty judgment and circumstantial evidence; 
that right-doing pays, and dishonesty never.” — Chicago Biter-Ocean. 

The jolly Rover. ByJ. T. Trowbridge. Illustrated. $1.25. 

“ This book will help to neutralize the ill effects of any poison which children 
may have swallowed in the way of sham -adventurous stories and wildly fictitious 
tales. ‘The Jolly Rover’ runs away from home, and meets life as it is, till he 
is glad enough to seek again his father’s house. Mr. Trowbridge has the 
power of making an instructive story absorbing in its interest, and of covering 
a moral so that it is easy to take.” — Christian Intelligencer. 

Young’ Joe, and Other Boys. ByJ. T. Trowbridge. Illus- 
trated. $1.25. 

“Young Joe,” who lived at Bass Cove, where he shot wild ducks, took some 
to town for sale, and attracted the attention of a portly gentleman fond of shoot- 
ing. This gentleman went duck shooting with Joe, and their adventures were 
more amusing to the boy than to the amateur sportsman. 

There are thirteen other short stories in the book which will be sure to please 
the young folks. 

The Vagabonds: An Illustrated Poem. By J. T. Trow- 
bridge. Cloth. $1.50. 

“ The Vagabonds ” are a strolling fiddler and his dog. The fiddler has been 
ruined by drink, and his monologue is one of the most pathetic and effective 
pieces in our literature. 

LEE AND SHEPARD, BOSTON, SEND THEIR COMPLETE CATALOGUE FREE. 


J. T. TROWBRIDGE’S BOOKS 


THE TOBY TRAFFOKD SERIES. 3 volumes. 

The Fortunes of Toby Tratford* By J. T. Trowbridge. 
Illustrated. $1.25. 

“If to make children’s stories as true to nature as the stones which the 
masters of fiction write for children of a larger growth be an uncommon 
achievement, and one that is worthy of wide recognition, that recognition 
should be given to Mr. J. T. Tkowbridge for his many achievements in this 
difficult walk of literary art. Mr. Trowbridge has a good perception of 
character, which he draws with skill; he has abundance of invention, which he 
never abuses; and he has, what so many American writers have not, an easy, 
graceful style, which can be humorous, or pathetic, or poetic.” — H. H. Stoddard 
in New York Mail. 

Father Brighthopes : Ax Old Clergyman’s Vacation. By 
J. T. Trowbridge. Illustrated. $1.25. 

This book was published in the early fifties by Phillips, Sampson & Co., of 
W'hich firm Mr. Lee (of Lee and Shepard) was then a member. It was very 
favorably received, and was followed by other stories, — a long series of them, 
— still lengthening, and which, it is hoped, may be prolonged indefinitely. 
Recently a new edition has appeared, and for a preface the author has related 
with touching simplicity the account of his first experience in authorship. 

It is well known that Mr. Trowbridge is primarily a poet. Some beautiful 
poems of his were printed in the early numbers of the Atlantic Monthly (in 
company with poems by Longfellow, Emerson, Lowell, and Holmes), 
and were well received. “At Sea” is a gem that has become classic. The 

E oetic faculty has not been without use to the story-writer. The perception of 
eauty in nature and in human nature is always evident even in his realistic 
prose. But his poetic gift never leads him into sentimentality, and his char- 
acters are true children of men, with natural faults as well as natural gifts and 
graces. His stories are intensely human, with a solid basis, and with an 
instinctive dramatic action. He has never written an uninteresting book. 

Woodie Thorpe’s Pilgrimag’e, and other Stories. By 
J. T. Trowbridge. Illustrated. $1.25. 

“ The scenes are full of human interest and lifelikeness, and will please many 
an old reader, as well as the younger folks for whose delectation it is intended. 
As in all the books of this author the spirit is manly, sincere, and in the best 
sense moral There is no ‘goody’ talk and no cant, but principles of 
truthfulness, integrity, and self-reliance are quietly inculcated by example. 
It is safe to say that any boy will be the better for reading books like this.” 
— St. Botolph, 


Neighbors’ Wives. By J. T. Trowbridge. Cloth. $1.50. 

As a novelty, the following acrostic is presented. The praise from the dif. 
ferent newspapers is brief, but to the point. 

N ot in the least tiresome. — Troy Press. 

E xquisite touches of character. — Salem Observer. 

I ntroducing strong scenes with rare skill. — Gloucester Telegraph. 

G roups well certain phases of character. — New Bedford Standard. 

II appy sprightliness of style and vivacity which fascinates — Dover Legion. 
B y many considered the author’s best. — yourtial. 

0 ne of the best of Trowbridge’s stories. — Commonwealth . 

R eader finds it difficult to close the book. — Hearth and Home. 

S toryallaliye with adyenturesand incidents striking and viyid. — Dover Star. 
"W hich is one of Trowbridge’s brightest and best. — Boston Trayiscript. 

1 s destined to be enjoyed mightily. — Salem Observer. 

V ery pleasant reading. — New York Leader. 

E xcels any of the author’s former books. — Montana American. 

S tory is in the author’s best yein. — New Haven Register. 


LEE AND CHEPARD, BOSTON, SEND TKEIR C 0 :. 1 ?LETZ GATALOG’JE FREE. 


J. T. TROWBRIDGE’S BOOKS 


THE TIDE-MILE ^STORIES. 6 volumeg. 

Phil and His Friends. By J. T. Trowbridge. Illustrated. 
$1.25. 

The hero is the son of a man who from drink got into debt, and, after having 

g iven a paper to a creditor authorizing him to keep the son as a security for 
is claim, ran away, leaving poor Phil a bond slave. The story involves a 
great many unexpected incidents, some of which are painful, and some comic. 
Phil manfully works for a year, cancelling his father’s debt, and then escapes. 
The characters are strongly drawn, and the story is absorbingly interesting. 

The Tinkham Brothers’ Tide-Mill. By J. T. Trowbridge. 
Illustrated. $1-25. 

“ The Tinkham Brothers ” were the devoted sons of an invalid mother. The 
story tells how they purchased a tide-mill, which afterwards, by the ill-will and 
obstinacy of neighbors, became a source of much trouble to them. It tells also 
how, by discretion and the exercise of a peaceable spirit, they at last overcame 
all difficulties. 

“Mr. Trowbridge’s humor, his fidelity to nature, and story-telling power 
lose nothing with years; and he stands at the head of those who are furnishing 
a literature for the young, clean and sweet in tone, and always of interest and 
value.’’ — The Coniinent. 

The Satin-wood Box. By J. T. Trowbridge. Illustrated. 
$1.25. 

“ Mr. Trowbridge has always a purpose in his writings, and this time he 
has undertaken to show how very near an innocent boy can come to the guilty 
edge and yet be able by fortunate circumstances to rid himself of all suspicion 
of evil. There is something winsome about the hero; but he has a singular 
way of falling into bad luck, although the careful reader will never feel the 
least disposed to doubt his honesty. ... It is the pain and perplexity which 
impart to the story its intense interest.’’ — Syracuse Standard. 

The Little Master. By J. T. Trowbridge. Illustrated. $1.25. 

This is the story of a schoolmaster, his trials, disappointments, and final 
victory. It will recall to many a man his experience in teaching pupils, and 
in managing their opinionated and self-willed parents. The story has the 
charm which is always found in Mr. Trowbridge’s works. 

“ Many a teacher could profit by reading of this plucky little schoolmaster.” 
— yournal of Education. 

His One Fault. By J. T. Trowbridge. Illustrated. $1.25. 

“As for the hero of this story, ‘His One Fault’ was absent-mindedness. He 
forgot to lock his uncle’s stable door, and the horse was stolen. In seeking to 
recover the stolen horse, he unintentionally stole another. In trying to restore 
the wrong horse to his rightful owner, he was himself arrested. After no end 
of comic and dolorous adventures, he surmounted all his misfortunes by down- 
right pluck and genuine good feeling. It is a noble contribution to juvenile 
literature.” — Woman's Journal. 

Peter Budstone. By J. T. Trowbridge. Illustrated. $1.25. 

“ Trowbridge’s other books have been admirable and deservedly popular, 
but this one, in our opinion, is the best yet. It is a story at once spirited and 
touching, with a certain dramatic and artistic quality that appeals to the literary 
sense as well as to the story-loving appetite. In it Mr. Trowbridge has not 
lectured or moralized or remonstrated; he has simply shown boys what they 
are doing when they contemplate hazing. By a good artistic impulse we are 
not shown the hazing at all; when the story begins, the hazing is already over, 
and we are introduced immediately to the results. It is an artistic touch also 
that the boy injured is not hurt because he is a fellow of delicate nerves, but be- 
cause of his very strength, and the power with which he resisted until overcome 
by numbers, and subjected to treatment which left him insane. His insanity 
takes the form of harmless delusion, and the absurdity of his ways and talk 
enables the author to lighten the sombreness without weakening the moral, in 
a way that ought to win all boys to his side.” — The Critic. 

LEE .'\N 0 SHEPARD, BOSTON, SEND THEIR COMPLETE CATALOGUE PRES 


LEE AND SHt'vAHb’S ILLUSTRATED JUVENILES 


J. T. TROWBRIDGE’S BOOKS 


THE START IN EIRE SERIES. 4 volumes. 

A Start in Life : A Story of the Genesee Country. Bj 
J. T. Trowbridge. Illustrated. $i.oo. 

In this story the author recounts the hardships of a young^ lad in his first 
endeavor to start out for himself. It is a tale that is full of enthusiasm and 
budding hopes. The writer shows how hard the youths of a century ago were 
compelled to work. This he does in an entertaining way, mingling fun and 
adventures with th,eir daily labors. The hero is a striking example of the 
honest boy, who is not too lazy to work, nor too dull to thoroughly appreciate 
a joke. 

Biding His Time. By J. T. Trowbridge. Illustrated. $i.oo. 

“ It is full of spirit and adventure, and presents a plucky hero who was willing 
to ‘ bide his time,’ no matter how great the expectations that he indulged in 
from his uncle’s vast wealth, which he did not in the least covet. . . . He was 
left a poor orphan in Ohio at seventeen years of age, and soon after heard of a 
rich uncle, who lived near Boston. He sets off on the long journey to Boston, 
finds his uncle, an eccentric old man, is hospitably received by him, but seeks 
employment in a humble way, and proves that he is a persevering and plucky 
young man.” — Boston Home journal. 

The Kelp Gatherers; A Story of the Maine Coast. By 
J. T. Trowbridge. Illustrated. $i.oo. 

This book is full of interesting information upon the plant life of the sea- 
shore, and the life of marine animals; but it is also a bright and readable 
story, with all the hints of character and the vicissitudes of human life, in 
depicting which the author is an acknowledged master. 

The Scarlet Tanager, and Other Bipeds. By J. T. 
Trowbridge. Illustrated. $i.oo. 

Every new story which Mr. Trowbridge begins is followed through succes- 
sive chapters by thousands who have read and re-read many times his preceding 
tales. One of his greatest charms is his absolute truthfulness. He does not 
depict little saints, or incorrigible rascals, but just boys. This same fidelity to 
nature is seen in his latest book, “The Scarlet Tanager, and Other Bipeds.” 
There is enough adventure in this tale to commend it to the liveliest reader, 
and all the lessons it teaches are wholesome. 


LEE AND SHEPARD, BOSTON. SEND THEIR COMPLETE CATALOGUE FREE. 





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NOV 30 1900 


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